Charitra Pabbaraju

Current MPhil Student, and Prospective PhD



Department of International Development

University of Oxford

3 Mansfield Rd, Oxford OX1 3TB, UK



Partitioning Body and State: Interethnic Conflict and Cooperation amongst Indians on Violence Against Women


Project Associated Fellowships, Awards, Talks

For this thesis, I was awarded Summa Cum Laude, Highest Honors in Political Science and International Relations. I was additionally awarded the below  Fellowships and Awards:
  • Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry: Fox Center Undergraduate Honors Fellow (2020-2021)
  • Halle Institute for Global Research Fellow (2020-2021)
  • University of Michigan Emerging Scholar (2020-2021)
This research experience allowed me to engage in a number of talks including the following:
  • American Political Science Association Graduate Student Presentation (2022)
  • Bill & Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Research Fellows Symposium (April 2021)
  • Interdisciplinary Exploration and Scholarship Fellowship  Honors Thesis Symposium (2021)
  • Emory Woodruff Scholars Program Finalist Weekend (2021) - Selected as one of four seniors to give a talk to Woodruff Scholar finalists about my research project
  • Pi Sigma Alpha National Honor Society, National Conference (2021)
  • Two guest lectures for Emory University's  Political Science Research Methods Course (POLS 208) on Survey Research Methods and design (2021)
  • University of Michigan Emerging Scholars Program and Presentation (2020 -2021)
  • Emory Family Fridays (2020-2021) - Selected as one of ten seniors to give a talk to prospective Emory students and their families about my research project
  • Emory Halle Institute for Global Research Symposium (2020)
  • Emory Undergraduate Research Symposia (2020) - Selected to present at Emory’s research symposia and related information sessions

Project Description

This project was my undergraduate honors thesis, culminating four years of learning about gender and ethnic violence, human rights, as well as mixed-methods approaches to measuring violence. 

Below is a sample abstract from my paper:

What incentives, if any, do rivalrous ethnic groups have for cooperation on policy issues along alternate social dimensions, such as gender violence? Following the gang-rape of Jyoti Pandey in December 2012, India reinvigorated its discussion on curbing violence against women as the nation erupted in protests. Since then, strategies to combat gender violence have invoked various linguistic cues and images of women as victims of violence, some of which have been nationalistic, such as the use of the term “India’s daughter” regarding Pandey’s case, or have particularly emphasized the religion or piety of a woman. Some scholars have suggested that techniques that blanket a certain social identity may in fact invoke a greater sense of community responsibility and encourage greater cooperation on cross-cutting social policies. Others have suggested that understanding policy organizing around the single lens of gender, or the treatment of “women” as a stable and defined group, essentializes the various or competing interests of women across other social dimensions, such as ethnicity. To investigate some of the complexities of how violence against women is presented in policy discourse, this study inquires: How do different types of information about a woman who is a victim of violence, including her nationality, ethnic affiliation, and occupation, condition the way people perceive violence against women as a salient policy issue? Moreover, how does it condition the way that people perceive responsibility for addressing violence against women at the individual, community, and government levels? Additionally, what are the driving demographic factors for any differences or disparities in policy mobilization, including ethnic tensions, gender, caste, among others?  While past scholarship has examined the effect of the labels on policy mobilization through a single-identity ethnic lens, this study takes a more in-depth look at the pluralistic language deployed by gender violence prevention strategies to gauge how ethnic biases may further interact with other social identities to condition mobilization. I hypothesize that discussions of women as victims of violence denoted with certain labels, such as religious or caste markers, might exacerbate and institutionalize ethnic conflict into policy. Through the use of a survey experiment deployed through Mechanical Turk, this study asks participants in India to answer a battery of questions that gages their demographic information, religious and nationalistic behaviors, voting behaviors, and pre-existing gender biases. Participants are then exposed to a randomized vignette describing a woman who is a victim of violence, loosely inspired by Pandey’s case, wherein label markers are used to signify her Hindu or Muslim religious background. Similar vignettes present a woman with no other identity-signifier, one that invokes nationalism, and two that signify occupational status. After exposure to the treatment, the survey fields participants’ attitudes on mobilizing around violence against women. I find evidence that Hindu men and women hold biases against Muslim women, particularly those who work, and are less likely to support policies to combat gender violence for them. Moreover, very religious Hindus are more likely to support policies to combat gender-based violence when a target is labeled as an “Indian” rather than a Muslim, for example. Caste affiliations also color the way that people mobilize around policies. These findings suggest that Islamophobia in India conditions mobilization around violence against women. Moreover, it suggests that ethnic out-group biases and antagonistic social norms can manifest into policy decisions along alternate social dimensions, like gender, while consolidating ethnic in-group power alongside other social inequities.
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