While women have always been part of organized resistance movements, recent cases including Sudan and Algeria have demonstrated how necessary this participation is and helped to address a historical tendency to elide the role of women in these movements. Despite this visibility, few studies have attempted to systematically document the distribution of women’s participation in both nonviolent and armed resistance movements, or to evaluate the effect of women’s participation on the character and success of these movements.

The Women in Resistance (WiRe) data set is the first of its kind to catalog women’s participation in 338 maximalist resistance campaigns in every country in the world from 1945 to 2014 (i.e., those campaigns that call for the toppling of an oppressive government, or territorial self-determination). Because the data set identifies both nonviolent and violent maximalist campaigns, it provides a comprehensive and systematic look at various dimensions of women’s participation in both types of resistance.

(KEY FINDINGS BELOW)

Erica Chenoweth