Conflict Analysis

Gendered Violence: Conflicts that Enable Violence Against Women

Gendered Violence and Social Conflict

Conflict can occur between two or more people, groups, and even with one’s self. The aim of this paper is to talk about gender identity, cultural violence, rational choice, and discourse in relation to Edward Azar’s model of protracted social conflict (PSC). Azar expresses the main sources of PSC are communal discontent, deprivation of human needs, governance and the state’s role and international linkages. Violence against women is a complex issue that borders the social, economic, and politic levels of a society as well as between societies. Gendered violence comes from a systematic approach to gender, the value of each gender, and how that value is operationalized. From the first day of life, a human being is placed into specific categories, either granted or dismissed of certain privileges, and regarded in an explicit manner based off gender.

Communal Content and Gender Identity

Azar states communal content as the initial creation of PSC. Communal content refers to being a member of a group and how a person’s needs are met through being a member of that group. By taking gender as an attribute of an identity group and relating it to communal context, one can observe gender inequalities that occurred between groups. History depicts the male gender as being the dominate gender and most, if not all, modern societies in the world having a patriarchal hierarchy structure. This results in women being treated as objects to utilize for men’s desires instead of a human being and equal partner. Author Anna Agathangelou discusses how Muslim women’s bodies are used as breeding machines in order to birth babies who will one day fight the war again the western world. By viewing a woman’s body as a machine to reproduce children, a woman is no longer regarded as a human being. This dehumanizing view point of women enables the elite leader(s) to divide and...