Civic Engagement as a Political Scientist: Tackling Violence against Women in Politics

Abstract

In September 2022, I had the opportunity to organize a roundtable at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), connected to my 2021 APSA Distinguished Award for Civic and Community Engagement. First conferred in 2020, the award honors “significant civic or community engagement activity by a political scientist which merges knowledge and practice and has an impact outside of the profession or the academy.” In my case, it recognized work I had been doing since 2015 with the National Democratic Institute and other global practitioners to recognize and combat violence against women in politics as a distinct form of violence aimed at preventing and undermining women’s political participation. Working on this topic has been one of the most challenging, and exhilarating, periods of my academic career. In my research on gender quotas, I listened to many positive stories about how quotas had created opportunities for women to enter and have a voice in political spaces. However, I also heard deeply disturbing accounts of violence, intimidation, and harassment, pointing to ongoing resistance and rising backlash against women as political actors. Through informal conversations, I learned that practitioner colleagues were observing similar patterns in their work on the ground and, like me, were grappling in search of language and a framework to understand this problem. Over a series of workshops and collaborative projects, a growing global network—consisting of politicians, activists, democracy practitioners, academics, and journalists—began theorizing and documenting this phenomenon (Krook 2019). Reflecting on what we could add to these debates as scholars, my then graduate student Juliana Restrepo Sanín and I drafted academic papers, but also presented at practitioner events, helped research and write policy reports, gave feedback on civil society toolkits, and wrote opinion pieces for popular audiences. Inspired by the productive nature of these dialogues across