Violence against women is a major problem in all countries, affecting women in every socio-economic group and at every life stage. Yet, when women enjoy good social and economic status they are less vulnerable to violence across all societies. This book develops a political economy approach to understanding violence against women - from the household to the transnational level - accounting for its globally increasing scale and brutality.

The Political Economy of Conflict and Violence against Women shows how political, economic, social and ideological processes intersect to shape conflict related gender-based violence against women. Through feminist interrogations of the politics of economies, struggles for political power and the gender order, this collection reveals how sexual orders and regimes are linked to spaces of production. Crucially it argues that these spaces are themselves firmly anchored in overlapping patriarchies which are sustained and reproduced during and after war through violence that is physical as well as structural. Through an analysis of legal regimes and structures of social arrangements, this book frames militarization as a political economic dynamic, developing a radical critique of liberal peace building and peace making that does not challenge patriarchy, or modes of production and accumulation.

Comprises 12 papers which assess the contemporary situation of women in India in four broad domains: the cultural, the social, the political and the economic. Argues that despite apparently positive indicators of progress, particularly education and paid employment, little has changed.

Eliminating violence against women globally is now seen as one of the major challenges of the twenty-first century. This book introduces a wide readership to the problem of violence against women and girls (VAWG) identified by social movements, researchers, and policymakers. It provides raw material, stories from around the world, macro data, and up-to-date knowledge on the various forms of VAWG. It highlights the intersections of VAWG with several other issues, andsets out the most promising policy and advocacy frameworks to end this violence.

Rape and other forms of sexual violence have always been a feature of war. Yet it is only fairly recently that researchers have identified rape as a deliberate tool of war-making rather than simply an inevitable side effect of armed conflict. Much of the emerging literature has suggested that the underlying causes of rape stem from a single motivation-whether individual, symbolic, or strategic-leading to disagreement in the field about how we can understand and respond to the causes and consequences of sexual violence in war. In Rape Loot Pillage, Sara Meger argues that sexual violence is a form of gender-based political violence (perpetrated against both men and women) and a manifestation of unequal gender relations that are exacerbated by the social, political, and economic conditions of war. She looks at trends in the form and function of sexual violence in recent and ongoing conflicts to contend that, in different contexts, sexual violence takes different forms and is used in pursuit of different objectives. For this reason, no single framework for addressing conflict-related sexual violence will be sufficient. Taking a political economy perspective, Meger maintains that these variations can be explained by broader struggles over territory, assets, and other productive resources that motivate contemporary armed conflicts. Sexual violence is a reflection of global political economic struggles, and can't be addressed only at the local level-it must be addressed through regional and international policy. She concludes by providing some initial ideas about how this can be done via the UN and national governments.

Until relatively recently, little had been written about gender issues in international relations despite the increased importance of the study of gender in other areas of the social sciences. Gender and International Relations fills that gap, providing a clear and accessible guide to the study of gender issues, feminist theories, and international relations. Steans illustrates how gender is central to nationalisms and political identity, the state, citizenship and conceptions of political community, security, and global political economy and development. Drawing on feminist scholarship from across the social sciences, she demonstrates the uses of feminism as critique. She also introduces readers to contemporary theoretical debates in international relations using concrete concerns and easily understandable issues to ground the discussion. The book does not construct a single feminist theory of international relations nor does it advance a particular perspective of how gender can best be understood in an international or global context. Rather, the book argues that feminist theories have collectively produced insights crucial to the study of international relations and that these insights can be used to challenge conventional approaches to the discipline.

Women have made significant inroads into political life in recent years, but in many parts of the world, their increased engagement has spurred attacks, intimidation, and harassment. This book provides the first comprehensive account of this phenomenon, exploring how women came to give these experiences a name: violence against women in politics. Tracing its global emergence as a concept, Mona Lena Krook draws on insights from multiple disciplines--political science, sociology, history, gender studies, economics, linguistics, psychology, and forensic science--to develop a more robust version of this concept to support ongoing activism and inform future scholarly work. Krook argues that violence against women in politics is not simply a gendered extension of existing definitions of political violence privileging physical aggressions against rivals. Rather, it is a distinct phenomenon involving a broad range of harms to attack and undermine women as political actors, taking physical, psychological, sexual, economic, and semiotic forms. Incorporating a wide range of country examples, she illustrates what this violence looks like in practice, catalogues emerging solutions around the world, and considers how to document this phenomenon more effectively. Highlighting its implications for democracy, human rights, and gender equality, the book asserts that addressing this issue requires ongoing dialogue and collaboration to ensure women's equal rights to participate--freely and safely--in political life around the globe.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the causes and consequences of, as well as responses to, sexual violence in contemporary armed conflict. It explores the functions and effects of wartime sexual violence as part of a global political economy of violence. To understand the motivations of the men (and occasionally women) who perpetrate this violence, the book analyzes the role played by systemic and situational factors such as patriarchy and militarized masculinity in a tangled web of plunder and profit. Difficult questions of accountability are tacked; in particular, the caes of child soldiers, who often suffer a double victimization when forced to commit sexual atrocities and other crimes.

The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns have led to a rise in gender-based violence. In this paper, we explore the economic consequences of violence against women in sub-Saharan Africa using large demographic and health survey data collected pre-pandemic. Relying on a two-stage least square method to address endogeneity, we find that an increase in the share of women subject to violence by 1 percentage point can reduce economic activities (as proxied by nightlights) by up to 8 percent. This economic cost results from a significant drop in female employment. Our results also show that violence against women is more detrimental to economic development in countries without protective laws against domestic violence, in natural resource rich countries, in countries where women are deprived of decision-making power and during economic downturns. Beyond the moral imperative, the findings highlight the importance of combating violence against women from an economic standpoint, particularly by reinforcing laws against domestic violence and strengthening women’s decision-making power.