Green houses for terrorism: measuring the impact of gender equality attitudes and outcomes as deterrents of terrorism

Abstract

Recent research suggests that there are links between terrorism and gender inequality. This study is a cross-national times series estimation for 57 countries for the period 1994–2002 to examine the impact of attitudes and actual outcomes of gender equality on levels of terrorism experienced by a country using World Values Survey and Global Terrorism Database. The results suggest that actual outcomes of gender equality have a significant and consistently negative impact on terrorism. Women’s actual advancement and equality in higher education, jobs and political representation are more effective in reducing terrorism than cultural attitudes supporting these rights. Additionally, comparing attitudes and outcomes of gender equality in a country, I find there is a gap between the two. This study has important public policy implications for focusing on greater levels of social, economic, and political gender equality for reducing the levels of terrorism.

Keywords:

• cultural attitudes
• gender inequality
• terrorism
• domestic terrorism
• transnational terrorism
• political violence

Notes

1. This article conceptualizes gender equality as the provision of equal opportunities to both men and women to develop their personal abilities. Gender equality does not imply sameness of sexes but envisions the presence and access to rights and opportunities for all individuals regardless of their sex. In practice, different societies differ in the social and cultural interpretation of biological differences between men and women and consequent distribution of responsibilities and resources leading to varying patterns of cross national gender inequalities.

2. For this study, I did consider including data on minority and religious discrimination and human rights violations as proxies for social inequalities in a country, but such data was not available for most of the countries and for the time period that I was interested in.

3. Geertz’s defines culture ‘as historically transmitted pattern of meaning embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about, and attitudes towards life’ (1973, p. 89).

4. Federal Bureau of Investigation homicide data available at http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded/expandhomicidemain

5. Johnson (2010) explains that patriarchal societies promote male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. McIntosh (1988) explains privilege as an unearned advantage that is available to one social group and systematically denied to others. Moreover, within organized social systems, a man’s access to male privilege depends on related characteristics such as class, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and disability status. She asserts that denial of men’s accumulated advantages gained from women’s accumulated disadvantage protects male privilege from being fully recognized, understood, addressed, and eventually ended (McIntosh 1988). The cultural ideas like control, strength, decisiveness, rationality, self-sufficiency, and logic are commonly associated with men and masculinity. These qualities are considered desirable, preferable, and normal in contrast to those normally associated with women and femininity such as compassion, cooperation, caring, mutuality, and sharing.

6. There are a number of examples of women trying to rebuild their lives, of fighting state-sponsored and non-sponsored terrorism through their activism, in the Middle East, Latin America, and Northern Ireland. Anderlini (2000) cites examples of women peace activism in Columbia, Georgia, Kashmir, Guatemala, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Liberia, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Africa.

7. Other key instruments include The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979), The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995), and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (2000), Millennium Development Goals.

8. In 2011, women constituted 14.6% of the US active army, 18.5% of the Australian Defence Force, 8.5% of the Norwegian force, and 8.55% of the French force. Women in combat are mostly in European countries such as Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Sweden. Other Angloshpere countries include Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and only recently the United States has allowed women in combat. Outside Anglosphere includes Eritrea, Israel, and North Korea. Pakistan and South Africa allow women as fighter pilots (Fisher, 2013, January 25; Ratcliffe, 2011, December 8).

9. Recently, we are seeing reports of cases of sexual violence against women by and within militaries, which might have not been reported earlier due to stigma attached to rape (Dick, 2012; MacFarquhar, 2011).

10. Caprioli and Boyer (2001) discuss these images in their paper “Gender, Violence and International Crisis”.

11. I will use data set developed by Enders et al., (2011), which separates domestic and international terrorist attacks in GTD. There are in GTD for 1970–2007, after applying three criteria: “(i) the attack is perpetrated for a political, socioeconomic, or religious motive; (ii) the attack is intended to coerce, intimidate, or send a message to a wider audience than the immediate victim(s); and (iii) the attack is beyond the boundaries set by international humanitarian law” (Enders et al., 2011). The authors are left with 66,383 terrorist incidents to classify as domestic or transnational. Based on a five-step procedure, they list 12,862 transnational terrorist incidents; this number is similar to ITERATE which contains 12,784 transnational terrorist incidents for the same time interval. Whenever there is missing or unknown information, the event is classified as unknown. So they determined 7108 incidents as uncertain and identified 46,413 incidents as domestic incidents.

12. The World Values Survey is a good mix of different kinds of societies at different levels of modernization based on the categorization of HDI produced annually by United Nations Development Program. HDI is based on standard 100-point scale of societal modernization. WVS includes affluent market economies like Japan, United States, and Switzerland, with per capita annual incomes as high as $40,000 or more, along with middle-level/industrializing countries like Brazil, Taiwan, and Turkey and also agrarian societies such as Tanzania and Nigeria with per capita incomes of $300 or less. Based on Freedom House ratings of level of democracy, WVS includes data on older democracies like Canada, India, and Australia; newer democracies like Taiwan, El-Salvador, and Estonia; semi democracies like Turkey; non or controlled democracies like China, Zimbabwe, and Jordon (Inglehart & Norris, 2003).

13. I checked all the models by including variable for Gini-coefficient, but the overall results remained the same. Outcomes of gender equality were statistically significant and negatively related to terror attacks.

14. Out of 305 total observations for terror attacks, 69 observations are zero.

15. The results are available with author and can be shared upon request.

16. In a previous study, I found that women in parliament is statistically significant and negative in association to transnational terrorism. The basic difference was the number of countries examined. My previous study included a bigger sample of 155 countries (from 1981 to 2002), and this study includes only 57 countries (from 1994 to 2002) because of data constraints of World Values Survey. The results of this study are limited to the 57 countries included in the models.

17. Quota project: Global database of quotas for women. See http://www.quotaproject.org/aboutQuotas.cfm

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aneela Salman

Aneela Salman recently completed her Ph.D. from Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany – State University of New York, USA. She was awarded Fulbright Fellowship for her doctoral research on gender and terrorism and British Chevening Award for master’s degree in London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, where she worked on her research project on women’s empowerment and decentralization issues in Pakistan. Her major research interest is gender and security, conflict, political violence, and terrorism issues.