In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Gendering Forced Migration

  • Introduction
  • General Overview
  • Gendering Labor Migration
  • Human Trafficking and Smuggling
  • Border Governance
  • Deportation as Forced Migration
  • Refugee Masculinities
  • Gender, Sexuality and Refugee Protection
  • Race, Colonialism and Refugee Protection
  • Protracted Displacement
  • Transnational Families and Marriage Migration
  • Internal Displacement
  • Climate Change and Slow/Sudden Onset Disasters

International Relations Gendering Forced Migration
by
Lucy Hall, Laura Cleton
  • LAST MODIFIED: 07 January 2025
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199743292-0327

Introduction

This entry discusses gendered and feminist approaches to the study of forced migration. The distinction at its heart, that between “forced” and “voluntary” migration, is not a natural given. Instead, scholars argue that it stems from bureaucratic labeling and category-making practices that very rarely reflect the reality of people on the move. Studies consistently find that people leave their country of nationality for a variety of reasons that do not fit neatly within categories of “economic” (allegedly voluntary) or “political” (allegedly forced) migration, reflecting the distinction at the heart of the 1951 Refugee Convention. These binary bureaucratic labels and categories nevertheless have significant power, as they affect migration journeys, opportunities, and experiences. Studying forced migration from a gendered perspective thus has a twofold purpose. First, it functions as a lens through which world politics can be examined, as it shows how the world is shaped by gendered concepts, practices, and institutions. Next to revealing the particularities of women on the move, studies in this entry examine how a range of sites—such as the nation state, migration regimes and policies—are gendered and gendering. Doing so directs attention to dynamic processes involved in how inequality is performed and maintained through the patriarchy, and the intersections of gender, sexuality, racism, capitalism, heteronormativity, ableism, and age-ism. Second, a gendered analysis of forced migration, also critiques the aforementioned forced-voluntary migration binary. Feminist scholars do not simply accept discourses as handed to them. Instead, they actively deconstruct these discourses as well as recognize their own roles in their creation, maintenance, or disputation. This article, therefore, intentionally does not follow the voluntary/forced binary as propagated by migration bureaucracies and enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention. Instead, the article selects studies that actively challenge the voluntary/forced binary, by centering the way force is inflicted, experienced, and circumvented in various forms of migration, including environmental migration, labor migration, and transnational family relations. The entry limits itself to English-language scholarship with a focus on geographical sites in both the Global North and Global South. Broadening the scope of this entry allows us to not only to show that force is often inflicted and experienced along a continuum, shifting across time and space, but also that gender matters for all migration journeys, to all bureaucratic categories of migration and for the ways we envision people on the move within and across nation states.

General Overview

Studies on forced migration, just like migration studies in general, have gradually shifted their attention from documenting the particularities of women to centering the multiple ways in which processes and responses to forced migration reproduce gender identities, roles, and relations. Forced migration scholars and practitioners for a long time largely identified, depicted, and responded to women refugees as non-agentic, apolitical victims, either as madonnalike figures or dependent, weak, and vulnerable womenandchildren. Even though they acknowledged that women’s experiences of displacement and migration differed from that of men, these accounts have reduced women’s experiences to vulnerability, especially to sexual violence, instead of exploring how and why women were victimized and persecuted. Trying to move beyond research that merely accounts for the presence of women in migration means analyzing the relationships between people of all gender identities, and their gendered relationships to states, NGOs and international institutions and how this structures their migration experiences. One of the first volumes to do so was Indra’s 1999 edited volume Engendering Forced Migration: Theory and Practice. Speaking mainly to scholars of anthropology and development, the volume discusses challenges to a thorough integration of gender into forced migration research and practice through a set of essays covering a global reach. Some twenty years later, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2019, a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, concludes that sustained attention to the gendered specificities of refugee protection continues to be necessary. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, as well as the monograph Freedman 2015, discuss the multiple ways in which gendered structures and power relations affect the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees, and the way in which (inter)national politics on asylum and refugee protection help construct and reinforce these gendered relations. While Freedman 2015 focuses on refugee policies and politics in the Global North, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2019 and Baines 2004 also center gendered responses to refugees in refugee camps and self-settlements in the Global South. Baines 2004, a classic monograph, pays specific attention to the role of the UN in promoting gender equality in conflict settings. Spijkerboer 2000 is an excellent entry point to understanding the history of the politics of refugee protection, and how this has changed from the post–World War II context through to the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. Mora and Piper 2021 is a recent, comprehensive overview of the literature on gender and migration, with a dedicated section on “Forced Migration, Gender-Based Violence and Conflict,” which pays ample attention to the intersections of gender with sexuality, ability, and age. Finally, Hall 2022 and Cleton and Bonjour 2022 include overviews of feminist scholarship on migration, particularly for the disciplines of International Relations and political science.

  • Baines, E. K. Vulnerable Bodies: Gender, the UN and the Global Refugee Crisis. London: Routledge, 2004.

    Focusing on the role of institutions in forced migration, Baines investigates the response of the United Nations to forced displacement in three cases: Bosnia, Rwanda, and Guatemala. The book reveals the discrepancies between advances in gender equality policies and humanitarianism on paper, versus its effects in practice.

  • Cleton, L., and S. Bonjour. “Feminist Scholarship in Europe on the Politics of International Migration.” In Feminist IR in Europe: Knowledge Production in Academic Institutions. Edited by M. Stern and A. E. Towns, 75–94. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-91999-3_5

    In this open-access chapter, Cleton and Bonjour provide an intellectual history of the feminist literature on international migration in the discipline of International Relations, produced in European institutions. They show that feminist IR-scholars mainly discuss migration in relation to “force”—during conflict or in its aftermath as refugees—and highlight the gendered, racialized, and classed logics that inform their experiences and responses to them by governments and international organizations.

  • Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. “Gender and Forced Migration.” In The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. Edited by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. Gil Loescher, Katy Long, and Nando Sigona, 395–408. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

    Comprehensive chapter within a larger handbook on forced migration studies. A great starting point for research, as it covers a wide range of issues on refugeehood and conflict. The chapter includes a short history of the role of gender in migration and development, a gendered critique on refugee status determination, attention to sexual orientation, as well as the paradoxical impacts of efforts to mainstream gender in refugee camps.

  • Freedman, J. Gendering the International Asylum and Refugee Debate. 2d ed. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

    DOI: 10.1057/9781137456236

    The second edition of Freedman’s monograph provides a gendered analysis to the debates on asylum and refugeehood, with a particular focus on France and the United Kingdom. It investigates the ways gendered structures and power relations affect the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees, and the way (inter)national policies reinforce gender relations. The book shows how gender inequalities impact all aspects of forced migration, without losing sight of the particularities of context and individual experiences.

  • Hall, L. “Migration and Displacement.” In Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations. 3d ed. Edited by L. J. Shepherd and C Hamilton, 275–287. London: Routledge, 2022.

    This chapter provides readers with an introductory text on gender and forced migration, organized around the question of what difference does it make to think about migration and forced displacement as a feminist? This chapter provides an overview of the literature on three key themes: gender, refugee protection, and securitization; the global political economy of migration and displacement; and climate change, disasters, and migration.

  • Indra, D. M., ed. Engendering Forced Migration: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999.

    This nineteen-essay volume seeks to investigate the universality, as well as the specificities, of gender and forced migration through time and space. The authors present a set of gendered case studies from across the world on topics ranging from the culture of aid to human rights and the gendered ways in which we envision displacement and resettlement.

  • Mora, C., and N. Piper, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Migration. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

    This comprehensive handbook explores the links between gender and migration. Its introduction usefully vouches for an intersectional approach to the study of gender and migration; particularly the section on “Forced Migration, Gender-Based Violence and Conflict” is worthwhile, with dedicated attention to issues not often associated with gender and forced migration, such as intersections with ability.

  • Spijkerboer, T. Gender and Refugee Status. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000.

    This book is an excellent starting point for sociolegal and political research on gender, sexuality, and refugee status. Spijkerboer brings together poststructural feminist and postcolonial theory in an analysis of Dutch refugee law and case law. The author argues that refugee law has taken on a new role since the end of the Cold War, an ideological role in which women have a symbolic presence.

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