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Making Choices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 September 2009

Mary Caprioli
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota-Duluth

Extract

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

— Albert Einstein
I never thought I would be considered a quantitative scholar. When I took my first statistics course in graduate school, I just did not ask the types of questions that required statistical analysis. I was interested in women in development, issues of power and powerlessness, and violence against women—not issues that are readily quantifiable. As you can imagine, I quickly learned how to ask the “right” questions. This all occurred when the democratic peace thesis began to take on a life of its own, and I reasoned that norms of inequality and injustice must surely transfer to the international arena, much the same way as those positive democratic norms are theorized to do (see Hudson et al. 2008/9). So I decided I would study conflict and war, which were readily quantifiable. And I would incorporate measures of women's equality. Thus, by some twist of fate, I chose quantitative methods as one of my testing fields and became a scholar interested in bridging the gap between feminist international relations theory and traditional international relations theory using quantitative methods.

Type
Critical Perspectives on Gender and Politics
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2009

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References

REFERENCES

Caprioli, Mary. 2000. “Gendered Conflict.” Journal of Peace Research 37 (1): 5168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caprioli, Mary. 2005. “Primed for Violence: The Role of Gender Equality in Predicting Internal Conflict.” International Studies Quarterly 49 (2): 161–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caprioli, Mary, and Douglass, Kimberly. 2008. “Nation Building and Women: The Effect of Intervention on Women's Agency.” Foreign Policy Analysis 4 (1): 4565.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caprioli, Mary, Hudson, Valerie, McDermott, Rose, Ballif-Spanvill, Bonnie, Emmett, Chad F., and Stearmer, S. Matthew. N.d. “The WomanStats Project Database: Advancing an Empirical Research Agenda.” Journal of Peace Research. Forthcoming.Google Scholar
Hudson, Valerie, Caprioli, Mary, McDermott, Rose, Ballif-Spanvill, Bonnie, Emmett, Chad F., Winter 2008/9. “The Security of Women and the Security of States.” International Security 33: 745.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tickner, J. Ann. 1992. Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
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