Abstract
Devorah Manekin and Reed M. Wood have been awarded the annual Bruce Russett Award for the Article of the Year published in Journal of Conflict Resolution during 2020. The winning article, “Framing the Narrative: Female Fighters, External Audience Attitudes, and Transnational Support for Armed Rebellions” was published in the October 2020 issue (JCR 64:9).
Members of the editorial board of JCR participated in a two-stage process in order to determine the winner of the award. The first step was for a nominating committee to recommend their top four articles for consideration. In the second step the four articles that received the most nominations were given to a voting committee who were asked to rank-order each of the articles. The winner received the highest overall rankings among all the votes cast. In casting their votes for the article of the year, the committee was asked to judge the strength of each article in terms of new and important contributions to basic research based on considerations of theoretical quality, methodological rigor, and substantive relevance to the field of conflict studies.
In the award-winning article, Manekin and Wood examine rebel group efforts to use narratives and images of female combatants to cultivate favorable attitudes among international audiences and foreign states regarding their political goals and military tactics. They develop a novel theory about the channels by which narratives and images of female combatants advance rebel goals by focusing on how such efforts increase the perceived legitimacy of their political goals and use of violence. They argue that rebel groups can secure direct and indirect benefits through their efforts at empathizing the role and importance of female combatants in their conflict strategy. They test their arguments through a compelling combination of online survey experiments and large-N statistical analyses of cross-national data. The survey experiments in the Unites States and Indonesia provide micro-level support for their theory that gender framing can positively affect individual attitudes towards rebel groups. The large-N analyses of over 260 active armed rebel groups from 1964-2009 provides cross-national support for their claims that a greater role for female combatants in rebel groups increases support among transnational non-state actors such as NGOs and diaspora groups. This increase in support among these non-state actors, in turn, bolsters state support for rebel groups. Overall, Manekin and Wood find that use of female combatant images and narratives by rebel groups are most likely to be successful when targeted at less conservative, Western-oriented NGOs and solidarity movements. This innovative article combines new theorizing with rigorous empirical tests that generate important new contributions to scholarship on rebel propaganda and diplomacy.
The editor of JCR would like to extend a special thanks to all of those board members who served on the nominating and voting committees: William Donahue, Michael Horowitz, Lisa Hultman, Todd Sandler, and Ron Smith.
The award is USD 500.