Women and Peace: Female Political Empowerment & the Prevention of Civil Violence

Today conflict mainly occurs within nations (as opposed to between nations), and the importance of women in creating and maintaining peace (which can be most simply defined as the absence of violence) through informal and formal leadership roles has also become known, offering much for the possibility of the reduction of violence within nations. Testing this relationship through a Poisson regression for the hypothesis that countries that have higher political empowerment for women will have less civil violence in their nations than countries with a lower level of political empowerment for women, this study is able to reject the null hypothesis (that no such relationship exists) by finding that the political empowerment of women has a statistically significant impact in the reduction of civil violence. In testing three additional intervening variables (democracy, GDP per capita, and primary education), it is determined that the political empowerment of women has the greatest impact on the reduction of civil violence, implying that, in the future, more effort should be placed on empowering women as a means for establishing peace