Paper short abstract:

Scholarship on the causes, dynamics and consequences of civil wars has experienced a sustained quantitative turn since the late 1990s. Our paper highlights the gendered implications of this turn and its effects on patterns of exclusion in Social Science research.

Paper long abstract:

Mainstream English-speaking scholarship on the causes, dynamics and consequences of civil wars has experienced a sustained quantitative turn since the late 1990s. Our paper highlights how this quantitative turn has led to a malestreaming of civil wars research, by focussing on three key areas: 1) the number of female scholars whose work has been published in high impact Social Science journals since 1998; 2) the proportion of high impact article publications in the Social Sciences that deal with issues of gender before, during and after episodes of civil wars (e.g. the recruitment of female combatants or gendered peacebuilding); and 3) the rise of theoretically and empirically problematic arguments on the arguably positive effects of experiencing violence. Our findings shed new light on gendered patterns in civil wars research, and, in doing so, make a novel contribution to ongoing discussions on issues of inclusion and exclusion in Social Science research (including both who and what tends to get published in high-ranking journals).