It is a very common belief to perceive women as more peaceful than men. Female stereotypes are connected to care, communication, tolerance and compassion. The first wave of feminists promoted this ideal of not only peace loving but peace bringing women.[1] These very traditional attributes of the female role model became even more politically relevant during the current COVID-19 crisis. Female heads of state were commended for their female crisis management, for showing compassion and extraordinary sympathy with their people while managing the pandemic. The media described German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other female leaders as caring and motherly, wondering whether women are the better leaders and crisis managers.[2] The connection of women to everything peaceful and pacifying has long prevailed.
Tag: conflict
Roundtable 10-23 on Fighting for Status: Hierarchy and Conflict in World Politics
International relations scholars and practitioners have long recognized that status is an important factor in world politics and that state motivations to enhance or maintain status are an important cause of international conflict. Until recently, however, no one had succeeded in defining the amorphous concept of status in a way that could generate a coherent set of theoretical generalizations and guide an empirical research strategy to test those generalizations. In the last decade that has begun to change, as we have seen a wave of theoretical and empirical analyses of the sources and consequences of status motivations. The study of status is now one of the liveliest research programs in the international relations field. In Fighting for Status, Jonathan Renshon has taken another significant step in moving the analysis of status from theoretical intuition to social scientific analysis, and in so doing has re-shaped the study of status in the international relations field.
Article Review 97 on “In Plain Sight: The Neglected Linkage between Brideprice and Violent Conflict.”
“In Plain Sight: The Neglected Linkage between Brideprice and Violent Conflict” by Valerie Hudson and Hilary Matfess makes the argument that ‘brideprices’ in patrilineal societies warp marriage markets. These warped marriage markets enable terrorist groups to capitalize on men’s need to pay marriage money to women’s families as a motivation to join. The authors suggest that terrorist and rebel groups, in response to warped marriage markets, provide cheaper marriage, and encourage violent behavior to obtain access to marriage (21). The article provides a lengthy theoretical discussion of the costs of marriage in patrilineal societies. It then explores three brief cases, in Nigeria, South Sudan, and Saudi Arabia, arguing for the importance of controlling brideprices and contributing to the security of women in order to reduce conflict in places where there is a real threat from terrorist or rebel groups.
Roundtable 4-5 on Good Fences, Bad Neighbors: Border Fixity and International Conflict
Boaz Atzili’s Good Fences, Bad Neighbors: Border Fixity and International Conflict explores the impact of the norm of border fixity that has arisen in world politics since 1945. He questions the view that a norm of border fixity reliably promotes peace; instead, he argues, the effect of the norm depends on conditions, and under today’s conditions the norm causes more war than peace.
