Deconstructing Refugee Women’s Empowerment

This book explores how self-identified feminist or women’s organizations in the asylum and charity sectors in the United Kingdom and France attach meanings to and address refugee women’s empowerment in their operations and how these perpetuate or disrupt global hierarchies.

Adopting a feminist, intersectional, and post-colonial approach, this book provides a nuanced assessment on how refugee assistance might move beyond the dominant “vulnerability versus empowerment” dichotomy. Acknowledging how some of the current practices still impose vulnerability on women, it aims to contribute to the newly established literature exploring how refugeehood and asylum-seeking are not necessarily disempowering for fleeing women, as they can provide new opportunities for negotiating gender norms, supporting women to practice agency. Building on rich empirical work conducted via semistructured interviews with refugee women and aid professionals, and participant observation in refugee communities, the book scrutinises how refugee women’s empowerment is embedded in the histories of colonialism, biopolitics, racism, and patriarchy, which legitimises the boundaries between the West and the rest, and it sheds light on the new strategies created by communities to move beyond these hierarchies, acknowledging women as autonomous actors who do not need to rely on aid structures.

Students and scholars of migration and refugee studies, feminist international relations, gender studies, postcolonial studies, alongside humanitarian practitioners, policy-makers, and advocates that operate at various levels, will find this interdisciplinary book useful for understanding the realities of refugee women and professional workers in aid structures.