About Article

It is now established in conflict studies that, more than women and girls, civilian men and boys are often targeted for elimination in conflict settings. However, existing explanations of gendercide against noncombatant men and boys in conflict settings tend to propose a single cause – namely, that adult men and adolescent boys are selectively targeted for extermination because of gendered assumptions that posit them as potential threats and combatants in armed conflicts. Although the cogency of this explanation is not disputed, overreliance on this single cause is quite symptomatic of causal oversimplification as it sidesteps context-dependent rationales for the gender-selective mass killings of civilian men and boys in myriad conflict settings. This article argues that the gender-selective massacre of civilian men and boys in conflict is driven by myriad contextual, religious/cultural, and historical factors that must be understood on their own terms. To transcend the fallacy of the single cause rooted in monocausal assessments of such gender-based violence against men in conflict settings, I draw on one-year in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and twenty-three qualitative interviews with victims/survivors, eyewitnesses, and ex-Boko Haram combatants in the Lake Chad region to decipher manifold context-dependent reasons for the gender-selective elimination of civilian men and boys in conflict settings. The ethnographic data underscore three intricately intertwined reasons for gendercide against noncombatant males: religious rationale; gendered threat perceptions; and refusal of gender-specific forced recruitment.