Gender Inclusivity and Decision Making in Collective Action

What is the effect of internal structure, namely women’s participation, on modality choices in civil resistance campaigns? From Chenoweth and Stephan (2011), women’s participation, or wider participation, leads to greater chances of success for civil resistance movements. Despite this, few conclusions have been drawn about the other roles women play in movements. While women’s movements have been largely addressed, the capacity, agency, and autonomy that women have and use in broader categories of movements needs further specification.

This paper bridges the gap between micro-gender literature, which says that women and women’s movements are more likely to be nonviolent, and macro-level understandings of civil resistance, social movements, and their modality choices. The role of women in collective action movements, including those that are not gender-issue focused, serves many purposes, including commitments to specific tactics such as violence and nonviolence. I develop a novel conceptualization of gender inclusivity as three core dimensions: women’s participation, women’s leadership, and gender-inclusive ideology. I hypothesize that each of these dimensions will have a positive impact on the selection of nonviolence by individuals and groups.

Following a mixed-methods approach, I first employ a logistic analysis with 290 cases of movements from the WiRe dataset and a temporal logistic and multinomial analysis of 1789 cases of organization-years from the MAROB dataset to test for cross-national patterns and trends. Next, I contextualize these findings with an in-depth within-case analysis of gender inclusivity and nonviolence in the case of the Timorese independence movement, shadowed by a discussion of the activism in West Papua and civil war in Aceh. Lastly, I analyze support for violence based on gender treatments in an original survey experiment of 1536 respondents from a nationally representative sample in Peru.

My results validate an expected positive relationship between each dimension of gender inclusivity and non-violence, as well as my theorized mechanisms of protection, norm enforcement, violence discounting, substantive support, and shifting decision environment. A better understanding of the relationship between gendered participation and movement characteristics, such as tactics, stands to benefit scholars and practitioners within and beyond the realms of collective action movements and political participation.