 When Civilians Are Attacked: Gender Equality and Terrorist TargetingLaura Huber Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2019, vol. 63, issue 10, 2289-2318 Abstract: While scholars demonstrate a consistent negative relationship between gender equality and violence, the effect of women’s rights on the quality of terrorism and the type of victims targeted remains unexplored. This article introduces a new model of terrorists’ strategic targeting by examining the trade-off between the ease of a civilian-oriented attack and the negative public reaction these attacks invoke. Within this framework, gender equality increases the costs of civilian targeting by inducing public opinion costs. As gender equality increases, the costs of attacking civilians increase relatively more than government-oriented attacks. Using data on domestic terrorism between 1970 and 2007 and a subnational examination of a randomly implemented gender quota in India, this study demonstrates that as gender equality increases, the ratio of civilian-oriented to government-oriented attacks decreases. Overall, this study refines our understanding of terrorists’ strategic targeting and identifies heterogeneity in the Women, Peace, and Security theory. Keywords: civilian casualties; terrorism; gender; women; peace; and security; human rights (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jocore:v:63:y:2019:i:10:p:2289-2318 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International) |
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