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.

Gender inequality has during the past decades become an increasingly studied topic in the field of peace and conflict. However, there are still many gaps to fill. This thesis is an aim at explaining a phenomenon that has yet to be uncovered, namely the relation between conflict related gender inequality and women’s attitudes towards reconciliation processes that include truth-telling and reintegration of ex-combatants. The thesis builds upon prior qualitative and quantitative studies of gender inequality in relation to conflict, and its potential consequences, as well as trauma-related psychology. Using a direct and structured comparative method of comparison between Rwanda and Sri Lanka, it is found that gender inequality both during and after conflict affect women’s attitudes towards peacebuilding negatively.