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Category: Project

Description: Prior research on civilian targeting in armed conflict has demonstrated that humanitarian actors, policy decision-makers, the media and outside observers hold gendered perceptions of victimhood, vulnerability and agency in war. In particular, the strategic framing of innocent civilians in humanitarian emergencies as women and children tends to obscure the vulnerability of men. Even though research on armed conflict provides ample evidence that civilian men are disproportionately likely to be victims of the most lethal forms of violence in war, qualitative studies from different contexts have shown that men’s vulnerability and victimization in war tend to be overlooked in humanitarian efforts. If we observe similar patterns among the general public, such misperceptions are likely to have important implications for policy preferences relating to the protection of civilians, acceptance of refugees and provision of aid. However, to date we lack a systematic understanding of the extent to which perceptions of civilian victims in war are gendered, and in particular to what extent the vulnerability and victimization of men are obscured or dismissed, and what consequences this has for public opinion on highly salient political issues such as refugee acceptance. In order to probe into these dynamics, we employ three survey experiments on both real and hypothetical conflicts, in which we vary the gender of the victims and the type of conflict violence they are exposed to.