Honor Ideology and Attitudes to Coexistence : Survey-findings from Sri Lanka

Sammanfattning: Honor ideology and militarized masculinities have recently gained more attention within the research field of peace and conflict studies. It has been found that attitudes related to honor and gender equality are associated to the use of violence on both an individual level and on state level. This thesis is exploring honor ideology in a post-war context in order to investigate if honor ideology is connected to attitudes regarding coexistence. By using new survey data collected in north-eastern Sri Lanka, ordinal logit regressions are used to test the hypotheses that individuals with higher levels of masculine toughness, patriarchal values and honor ideology are less willing to coexist with people from former ‘rivalling’ groups. From the regression analyses, it was found that there seems to be a relationship between higher levels of masculine toughness, patriarchal values and honor ideology, and lower levels of willingness to coexist with people from former ‘rivalling’ groups – findings that were statistically significant on 95-99% confidence interval. However, the results are not very robust and further research is needed to investigate how honor ideologies affect other attitudes that are important for peace.