A well-established literature links war victimisation to increased levels of political participation, emphasising “post-traumatic” growth as a key mechanism explaining why war victims behave differently in the political arena.
While most of the research to date has failed to investigate gendered differences, where they have been investigated, researchers have evidenced stark differences in the relationship between victimisation and political participation between genders, revealing gaps in our understanding of the mechanisms linking the two, as post-traumatic growth does not imply gendered outcomes. Against this backdrop, we investigate political participation in post-conflict Kosovo to shed light on the mechanisms at play and their gendered dimension. We thus propose new analyses, relying on new primary data, investigating a broad set of victimisations (in particular including exposure to wartime sexual violence) and a broad set of potential mechanisms (reflecting psychological factors, personal values and perceptions of politics as potential enhancing or constraining factors). Our results confirm marked differences in the consequences of victimisation on political participation by gender. In addition, while post-traumatic growth appears not to play a strong role for victims, we find that views on gender roles and perceptions of the political arena as masculinised do matter for women’s participation.
Dr Elodie Douarin is an Associate Professor at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL. She received a PhD in Economics from the University of London (Wye College) in 2008, and joined SSEES UCL in 2012, after a post-doc in the Economics department of the University of Sussex. Elodie's recent work falls into Institutional Economics and Comparative Economics. She is interested in understanding economic behaviour (micro) and development (macro) within economic systems, defined as bundles of formal and informal institutions. Her recent research has thus, for example, focused on how values and beliefs relate to, or impact on, economic behaviour, and how specific shocks or life events shape values and beliefs. Elodie has also written about some aspects of growth and development and their relation to values and beliefs. She often focuses on Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Dr Denisa Kostovicova is an Associate Professor in Global Politics at the LSE European Institute. She is also the Director of LSEE Research on South Eastern Europe.