Man Up, Weapons Down: Survey Experiments on Civil Resistance and Masculinity

• In Event: Intersecting Gender and Armed Conflict

Abstract

How does participation in nonviolent resistance affect the male performance of gender? Male participation in warfare, insurgency, and violent extremism is frequently driven by the desire to perform a particular masculine gender identity. Seminal nonviolent resistance figures such as Gandhi or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. argued that participation in nonviolent resistance fulfilled a similar role for men, providing opportunities to perform a masculine identity based in agency and strength while avoiding the toxic and destructive aspects of masculinity embedded in violent conflict. Yet while there is a growing literature on the impact of women’s participation in nonviolent resistance, little literature to date has used a gender lens to examine the participation of men. In this paper I address this lacuna with a series of online survey experiments presenting self-identified male subjects with a variety of nonviolent resistance scenarios. I show that simulated participation in nonviolent resistance increases self-perceived masculinity, and that this effect largely explains males’ greater willingness to join peaceful protests after these protests have faced violent government repression. This paper sheds new light on the gender dynamics of nonviolent resistance and on the possibility of nonviolence to substitute for the masculine gender performative aspect of violent conflict.

Author

• Jonathan Pinckney, University of Texas at Dallas