How does gender shape political violence? Bardall, Bjarnegård, and Piscopo (2020) break down this dynamic into three core elements: motives, forms, and impacts, to give researchers and policymakers greater analytical precision.
To build this framework, the authors bridge the traditional political violence literature, which focuses on classifying attacks, with the gender and politics literature, which analyzes barriers to women’s political participation. Within this model, gendered motives occur when perpetrators rely on violence to preserve hegemonic men’s control over politics.
Gendered forms highlight the way existing gender roles and tropes create distinct experiences of violence for men and women. Finally, gendered impacts capture the subjective meaning-making processes that unfold as different audiences react to political violence. In doing so, Bardall, Bjarnegård, and Piscopo provide a clear, structured way to understand how gender operates across every stage of political violence.
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Bardall, G., Bjarnegård, E., & Piscopo, J. M. (2020). How is Political Violence Gendered? Disentangling Motives, Forms, and Impacts. Political Studies, 68(4), 916–935. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719881812