Gender ideologies and forms of contentious mobilization in the Middle East

Abstract

This article explores those factors that shape a political organization’s choice of tactics in political mobilization with a particular focus on the influence of gender ideology on the choice of different type of contentious action. To understand why political organizations engaging in contentious politics choose to employ violent tactics, nonviolent tactics, or a mixture of both, current scholarship has tended to focus on factors such as relationship with the government, external support, and religious or leftist ideology. Far less attention has been given to the role of an organization’s ideology relating to gender when predicting its behavior. In addition, much of the analysis of contentious activity has analyzed the use of violence or protest separately and rarely examines the choice of a mixed strategy. We employ a time-series multinomial logistic regression analysis to examine the Middle East Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior dataset (MAROB), including data over 24 years on 104 ethno-political organizations that have used a range of tactics including protest, violence, and/or a mix of the two, to investigate organizational and state-level variables that lead organizations to choose different strategies. We find that a number of variables can influence a movement’s choice to engage in one strategy over another. Gender-inclusive ideology makes an organization more likely to engage in protest and less likely to choose a violent or mixed strategy.