The gender gap in attitudes to foreign policy is well established in public opinion literature. Studies have repeatedly reported that women tend to be more peacefuland less militaristic than men. This article reexamines attitudes of individuals inrelation to foreign policy and pits the gender gap against the largely forgotten feminist gap. We argue that the individual-level relationship between gender equality attitudes on the one hand, and tolerance and benevolence on the other, is underresearched,but also that key contributions about the effects of feminism have beenmostly ignored in research on the gender gap in public opinion. We return to the notion of a causal relationship between gender equality attitudes, and peaceful attitudes, and of a feminist gap that also exists among men. In a series of novel empirical tests, we demonstrate that attitudes to gender equality, not biological sex, explain attitudes towards other nationalities and religious groups. Using individual level survey data from five countries around the Pacific: China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States of America, we show that both men and women who reject gender equality are much more hostile both to other nations and to minorities in their own country.
Why has there been no jihadist civil war in Southeast Asia? Although there has been a global surge in armed conflicts where at least one side fights for self-proclaimed Islamist aspirations, the region of Southeast Asia stands out by not having experienced a single jihadist civil war after 1975. Yet, so far, there have been no systematic comparisons of the frequency and nature of the Islamist violence in Southeast Asia and the rest of the world. This study therefore contributes by exploring the empirical trajectories in the region and situating Southeast Asia to global developments, utilizing new and unique data on religiously defined armed conflicts 1975-2015. We find that whereas the number of people killed in Islamist violence has increased in the rest of the world, it has decreased in Southeast Asia. We argue that Southeast Asia has prevented outbreaks of jihadist civil wars, and contained and partially resolved ongoing Islamist conflicts before they have escalated, due to three interrelated factors: the lack of internationalization of Islamist conflicts in the region, the openness of political channels for voicing Islamist aspirations, and government repression. This article suggests insights from the region that can be valuable from a global perspective.
If the assessment of ASEAN's success in the past is difficult, speculations on whether ASEAN will be a success will be close to impossibility. Yet this is what is intended in this article. However, this is done by first defining robust criteria of success of conflict prevention. Conflict prevention is successful if conflicts and battle deaths can be avoided, either by means of conflict resolution or transformation, or simply by means of conflict avoidance. By starting with this criterion the article will argue that ASEAN peacefulness cannot be explained by durable objective conditions. Instead, it is built on imagined realities. The imagined realities of the ASEAN Way are getting more difficult to sustain due to their interaction with material and normative/institutional developments. Many of the constructed foundations of the ASEAN Way are unsustainable in the new realities where communication has become easy and uncontrollable, and societies have become wealthier and more democratized. However, the article will show that evidence of existing conflict violence suggests that ASEAN has started to reformulate its approach to conflict prevention and that this has largely been successful.