Cross-National Variation in Women’s Rights: Europe and Civil War

This dissertation evaluates the impact of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on Women’s Social, Economic and Political rights in post-Conflict countries. In order to evaluate the relationship with sound causal logic, I set out to study multiple relationships to understand the impact of the variables in question. Looking at the nature of the relationship required an evaluation in 3 ways, which culminated in the writing of 4 separate chapters. Chapter 2 demonstrates the importance of understanding Women’s Rights and their role in economic development and peace building. This places women’s rights in context to set the scene for the rest of the dissertation as I evaluated different women’s rights as the dependent variable throughout. Chapter 3 tests the impact of FDI on women’s social and economic rights, where the bilateral flow of FDI is the main independent variable in question. The results show that the bilateral context of FDI decreases women’s economic rights directly and social rights indirectly for non-OECD countries. Chapter 4 lays the context for women’s political rights in post-conflict countries. This relationship examines the impact of civil war on women’s political rights, which subsequently spills over to gaining more rights in the social and economic spheres. The results show that civil war is a window of opportunity for women to gain their political rights, where this is evident after the second election period. Finally, Chapter 5 is an amalgamation of both chapters 3 and 4 to evaluate the main question of the dissertation. The impact of the bilateral context of FDI flow on women’s social, economic, and political rights in post conflict countries is studied. The results of Chapter 5 show that FDI deteriorates women’s political rights post conflict. As for women’s social and economic rights, the results were insignificant.