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Previous studies find a strong relationship between armed conflict and gender equality, but only compare armed conflict to no armed conflict onset. However, opposition movements use different means to challenge governments, such as nonviolent or armed strategies. This study explores this variation and poses the question: How does the level of gender equality affect the onset of nonviolent campaigns and armed conflicts? It makes two contributions. First, I quantitatively test the impact of gender equality on different forms of conflict onset, and second, I propose a comprehensive gendered mobilization argument based on strategic choice theory. Nonviolent campaigns rely on mass participation, and the nonviolent conflict literature claims that they are open to a wider array of participants, including women, compared to armed conflicts. I argue that gender norms affect movements’ expectations of mobilization (mass or limited) as well as conflict norms (nonviolent or violent) in society, and subsequently, the choice of conflict strategy. I hypothesize that higher levels of gender equality, measured by fertility rate and female-to-male primary school enrolment ratio, increase the likelihood of nonviolent campaign onset, compared to both armed and no campaign onset. This study analyses country-year data from the UCDP and NAVCO datasets between 1961 and 2006 and finds that increases in gender equality are, on average, associated with an increased likelihood of nonviolent conflict onset.

Women and men frequently participate in nonviolent campaigns, but gendered patterns in individual-level grievances and organizational resources influencing nonviolent campaign participation remain understudied. I explore these using unique survey data on participation in the 2006 Nepali Jana Andolan II movement. Drawing on political opportunity, grievance, and resource mobilization theories, I test several gender neutrality assumptions and propose a new argument: the gendered participation paradox. Gender inequality affects opportunities for men and women to partake in nonviolent protests by aggravating grievances and leading to lower levels of organizational resources for women. This results in a gendered participation paradox, where women suffer from equal or higher levels of grievances than men, but have less resources with which to translate grievances into nonviolent campaign participation. The findings support the argument. Political discontent has a positive effect on women’s and men’s nonviolent campaign participation, but they do not protest at the same rate despite reporting equal levels of discontent. Organizational resources are important to campaign participation for both men and women. Yet women have less organizational resources than men, supporting the notion that gender preconditions resources for participation. Finally, gender conditions the effect different types of organizational resources have on participation. These findings show the importance of taking a gendered perspective when explaining nonviolent campaign participation.

This article presents the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) "Violent Political Protest"€ (VPP) data set: a new -standalone- category of organized violence, which complements, and is compatible with, UCDP's three categories of organized violence: one-sided violence, non-state, and state-based conflict. It consists of violent political protests, with at least 25 casualties during a year, in which informally organized civilians challenge states over governmental or territorial issues. We describe the data collection process, and demonstrate the data's use with empirical analyses. Violent political protest is present globally, but most prevalent in the Middle East and Africa, and increasingly common over time. Violent political protest frequently co-occurs with state-based conflicts, but rarely due to conflict escalation. We explore if this is due to shared contexts, and find that gender inequality increases the likelihood of VPP onset, similar to state-based conflicts. Finally, we identify avenues for future research, including using VPP to assist in a more precise and complete analysis of organized violence.

This article re-visits quantitative research on the relationship between gender equality and armed conflict, highlighting concerns about construct validity, sampling, and data quality. Past research has used imperfect measurements for gender equality, and poor construct validity may have led to an inflated sense of support for the relationship. Contrary to common belief, I show, by mapping previous findings, that support for the relationship is mixed. Previous quantitative scholarship has also generally been based on similar -older- samples, which entails missing policy developments and running the risk that findings are time specific. Finally, I identify data quality issues. Some indicators suffer from extensive missing data, and using them in future research is questionable. Missing data have additionally been handled less than ideally, potentially biasing findings. I revisit the relationship with updated samples and a selection of variables, paying attention to data quality. Using out-of-sample validation, I find that all gender equality indicators improve the prediction of conflict incidence, even though models using traditional null-hypothesis testing do not provide significant support. Overall, we should continue our focus on collecting new, better data, and take into account new evaluation techniques, such as out-of-sample evaluation. This approach will open exciting new and unexplored avenues of research.