An online presentation by Sabrina Karim (Cornell University). This event is part of the Political Economy Lunch Seminar (PELS), co-hosted by the International Security Research Colloquium.
Under what conditions do individual security personnel engage in abuse of authority? Individual security forces are trained and professionalised to follow and obey rules, but they sometimes engage in illicit, or taboo behaviour such as the use of excessive force against civilians. Building on work that shows that gender and masculinity affect conflict behavior among states, we posit that individual-level beliefs about gender roles, toxic masculinity as well as primes trigger gender affect personnels’ attitudes about appropriate behaviour. When individuals are forced to think about their own masculine identities and/or when they hold certain beliefs about gender roles and masculine identity, they may be more likely to sanction misconduct. We test our hypotheses using original survey experiments and survey data from four countries' security forces—police in Zambia, military in Ghana, military and police in Uruguay, and police and gendarmerie in Senegal. We find that priming personnel to think about gender leads to a decrease in believing taboo behaviour was serious. Moreover, those who held rigid views about gender roles were more prone to escalate a security situation, were less likely to believe that taboo behaviour was serious and were less likely to report colleagues that engage in taboo behaviour. Additionally, respondents with toxic masculine views were more likely to escalate security situations and less likely to report colleagues’ taboo behaviour. The results show that there is individual-level variation in the propensity to engage in misconduct. It also reifies the importance of incorporating gender in the study of violence.
The Political Economy Lunch Seminar offers an informal setting for Hertie School scholars and external speakers to present works in progress. Meetings are catered and last for only an hour. Seminars during the spring semester 2021 will take place exclusively online. Please send an email to Dayna Sadow (sadow[at]hertie-school[dot]org) or use the registration form on the individual event pages to receive a link; those who are currently on the distribution list will receive the link automatically by email. The seminar is hosted weekly during the semester at the Hertie School in Berlin. The upcoming events in the series are listed on this page and in the main events calendar. To explore past events click on the past events button.
