Conceptualizing more inclusive elections: violence against women in elections and gendered electoral violence

ABSTRACT

Violence against women in politics and throughout the election cycle has been documented as an impediment to the free and equal political participation of women, and to the conduct of inclusive elections. Academic research and practitioner assessments have raised the profile of this global problem, and draw attention to key challenges in theory development, the operationalization of concepts, and the creation of shared measures for data collection. This article seeks to contribute to the scholarship by positing a theoretical framework that situates violence against women in elections (VAWE) at the intersection of gender-based violence and political violence. We examine the role of gender in relationship to targets, perpetrators, motives, and forms of electoral violence to demonstrate the importance of studying violence motivated by gender discrimination alongside more conventional motives of electoral violence. The analysis is informed by examples drawn from field research in Uganda.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• women
• elections
• political violence
• election violence
• intersectionality

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Gabrielle Bardall, Toby James, Holly Ann Garnett, and the anonymous reviewers at Policy Studies for their many helpful comments on earlier versions of this work. We also benefitted greatly from the insights shared by participants at the 2018 Uppsala University workshop on Gender, Politics and Violence, and the 2018 workshop, Measuring Violence against Women in Elections, hosted by the Institute for Developing Nations (IDN) at Emory University, and The Carter Center. We also owe a debt of gratitude to colleagues who participated in the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) workshop, Violence Against Political Actors: New Research Directions, especially organizers Elin Bjarnegård and Mona Lena Krook, and discussant Pär Zetterberg. Research assistant Sophie Clark cheerfully and efficiently addressed our every request. Finally, ethnographic data that informs this study was made possible because of the assistance of Ugandan human rights defender and magistrate Lina Zedriga Waru whose expansive professional network greatly facilitated the data collection effort during Schneider’s field work in Uganda.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Fieldwork data

Focus group discussion, women councilors LCIII, Gulu, Uganda, 2 August 2018.

Focus group discussion, mixed candidates, agents, and voters, Soroti, Uganda, 26 July 2018.

Focus group discussion, market women’s association, Soroti, Uganda, 26 July 2018.

Focus group discussion, women councilors LC mixed, Soroti, Uganda, 27 July 2018.

Key informant interview, community radio host, Gulu, Uganda, 31 July 2018.

Key informant interview, director of women’s rights organization, Gulu, Uganda, 31 July 2018.

Incident report, case 13, female respondent, Gulu Uganda.

Incident report, case 25, female respondent, Soroti, Uganda.

Notes on contributor

Paige Schneider is Assistant Professor of Politics, and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of the South (Sewanee).

David Carroll is Director of the Democracy Program at the The Carter Center, with international election observation and monitoring projects as part of his portfolio.

ORCID

Paige Schneider http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7540-5027

Notes

1 https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Women/ViolenceAgainstWomeninPoliticsReport.pdf

2 As far as we can determine, the use of the concept of a male preserve was first introduced in the academic scholarship devoted to the study of sport and gendered power relations and is attributed to Sheard and Dunning. Christopher R. Matthews resurrects the term in his insightful 2016 article in the journal Gender & Society.

3 In the interest of coalescing around a single set of acronyms, we use the acronyms for violence against women in politics (VAWP) and violence against women in elections (VAWE), or in some cases VAWP/E, that is utilized by UN Women in the recent comprehensive programming guide, Preventing Violence against Women in Elections, that can be found here, http://www.unwomen.org/-/media/headquarters/attachments/sections/library/publications/2017/preventingvaw-in-elections.pdf?la=en&vs=2640

4 In recent field work in northern Uganda, one of the authors (Schneider) heard compelling stories from informants about the effectiveness of the use of threats. Acts of violence, while they did occur, were not necessary to undermine the sense of safety of voters and candidates and dissuade individuals from participating in the electoral process.

5 Following Höglund (2009 , 417) and others in the field of election and conflict studies, we employ the term target to denote victims of violence. While the term survivor has been widely adopted in the public health literature--particularly for victims of intimate partner violence and especially sexual assault, we argue that target is a generic and more appropriate concept to describe victims of the wide range electoral violence documented in the present study.

6 In Uganda we found that out of 90 acts of election violence reported by informants in Soroti, Moroto and Gulu, 44 were instances of group perpetrated violence. Of these, four groups are all female, nineteen are all male, and twenty- one are mixed, with “mostly male” but some female members.

7 In fact, there is no mention of gender or women in the index of either of these volumes.