With women comprising roughly 64% of its parliament – the world’s highest proportion – Rwanda has been touted as a “gender equality” success story. Yet despite reforms that increased women’s political representation following civil war and genocide in the 1990s, the state has moved to become repressive and autocratic, with high rates of violence against women.

In the United States, a presumed beacon for women’s rights, maternal death rates, reproductive rights and beliefs about gender roles vary widely across the country, and political violence is not uncommon, from the Capitol insurrection to an attempted assassination of a presidential candidate.

Both are examples of how the catch-all term “gender equality” can mask important discrepancies in women’s status that are correlated with more or less violent societies, Sabrina Karim, associate professor of government in the College of Arts and Sciences, argues in a new book, “Positioning Women in Conflict Studies: How Women’s Status Affects Political Violence,” co-authored with Daniel W. Hill Jr., associate professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia.

“Much of the literature suggested that ‘gender equality’ is something of a panacea that reduces the likelihood of interstate war, intrastate war, terrorism and state violence,” they write. “Our results paint a different picture.”

To promote better analyses and policies, the scholars define four key indicators of women’s status – women’s inclusion, women’s rights, harm to women and beliefs about women’s roles – and develop novel measures for assessing how each impacts different types of political violence.

Karim, director of the Gender and the Security Sector Lab, discussed the book with the Chronicle.

Question: Why isn’t “gender equality” a useful way to gauge women’s status around the world?

Answer: The policy world adopted the term “gender equality” in the 1990s without thinking critically about what it means, and it started being applied everywhere within the international organization system. In United Nations and World Bank reports, everything is framed under the umbrella of gender equality, whether we’re talking about the number of women in politics, or laws against violence against women, or reproductive rights. If you call everything “gender equality,” then you can’t really pinpoint where change needs to happen. Our goal is to define concepts and measurement precisely so that we can get at the exact pathways for how different aspects of women’s status contribute to political violence or peace.

Q. What’s an example?

A. People usually think about “gender equality” in terms of women’s participation in politics – the number of women in parliament, or heads of state – and try to link that to whether there’s more repression, civil war or interstate war. But it’s much broader than that. We show that women’s inclusion in politics is not the main avenue to get to more peaceful societies, because you’re not actually changing the gendered political system or gendered spaces that often limit women’s influence within politics.

We advocate for larger, systemic change that includes all aspects of women’s status – but especially a reduction of harm to women. When you reduce harm to women, you allow women to mobilize politically but also through civil society and in politics, which is one of the most successful pathways for getting political reform and change in a country. When there are high levels of domestic violence, maternal mortality, etc., women experience multiple levels of harm that prevent their ability to mobilize politically.

Effectively, allowing harm to women to persist is a demobilization strategy, to keep women from politically mobilizing for change. People also rarely think about gendered beliefs about women’s roles. We show how such beliefs can be a gateway for extremist groups, often right-wing, to recruit people into armed groups.

Q. Why does harm to women make war or terrorism more likely?

A. In societies where there are higher levels of domestic violence or maternal mortality, where there are higher levels of physical harm to women directly and indirectly, those societies just value human life less, and so they’re more willing to pay the costs of war. In addition, the most successful political revolutions and social movements are ones that are more diverse, that have high numbers of women in them. In societies where women can’t organize for political change because they are dying or being regularly injured or harmed, you’re less likely to see change through nonviolent means, and so those societies resort more to political violence to get the change that they want.

Q. What can be done to reduce harm to women?

A. People tend to conflate women’s rights with harm to women, but they’re different. You might have laws to address harm to women, but if you’re not enforcing them, then you still have high levels of harm. Our book is directed at international organizations like the U.N. and World Bank, and their donor countries who often fund women’s rights campaigns. However, we argue that some of these resources should devoted to changing ideas about the value of women in society.

One of our biggest policy recommendation is to focus on the value of women’s organizations in civil society, because they’re the catalysts for most kinds of change, including reduction of harm to women. One recent example is in Gambia, where politicians were threatening to get rid of the ban on female genital mutilation. The only reason that that did not happen is because of women’s mobilizing and civil society organizing against removal of that ban.

Q: Does improving women’s status broadly benefit peace?

A: If we worked on all aspects of women’s status, yes, we would get to more peaceful societies. But do I think they’re all equal in terms of the pathways to peace? I do not. We present a more nuanced picture and identify which aspects of women’s status are associated with a lower risk for which forms of violence. Instead of saying gender equality causes peace, let’s be specific about what aspects of women’s status allow us to get to more peaceful societies, and which pathways have more evidence than others. Should we focus on women’s rights? Or should we focus on changing beliefs about women’s gender roles? Or should we focus on harm reduction? Given limited resources, our strategy allows us to formulate better policy recommendations.