Book Review: Gender, Violence, Refugees

Guest post by Cecilia Farfán-Méndez. Cecilia is the Head of Security Research Programs at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego. She holds a Ph.D. in political science with a focus on international relations and organization theory from UC Santa Barbara. She tweets @farfan_cc

Review of Gender, Violence, Refugees edited by Susanne Buckley-Zistel and Ulrike Krause (Berghan Books 2017; 2019 paperback)

While certain conflicts like the war in Syria, and specific treatment of migrants such as Australia’s offshore detention facility on the island of Nauru have grabbed media attention, data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) underscore the widespread prevalence of forced migration across the globe. According to UNHCR, 70.8 million people are forcibly displaced worldwide, and in 2018, most new asylum applications came from Venezuelans – a population once among the wealthiest in Latin America.

With 37,000 people a day being forced to flee from their homes due to conflict and persecution, Gender, Violence, Refugees is a valuable intervention in the policy-relevant, academic literature on forced migration. Rich with information gathered through research and first-hand experiences, this volume makes two central contributions to policy and refugee studies: 1) we urgently need to stop framing women solely as victims and men solely as perpetrators of violence in contexts of forced migration, and 2) by focusing on the agency of women, men, and children, we can see how they experience violence in distinct ways and examine how each group responds to structural violence that exist throughout the process of displacement.

The authors develop an effective argument against binary conceptualizations that present women as victims and men as perpetrators: this binary approach renders invisible the violence that boys and men experience in times of crisis, including sexual abuse and forced recruitment into combatant groups. A gendered approach to forced migration is therefore, not exclusively a women’s issue and raises important questions about the role and construction of masculinity in post-conflict environments.

The authors also show that the dichotomy of women as victims and men as offenders perpetuates a less evident yet acutely problematic narrative. White communities are mainly construed as morally righteous heroes who “save” brown women and children victims from morally corrupt and backwards brown men offenders who are themselves often construed as sexual predators acting on primal instincts. By thinking of violence as inherent to displaced communities, and in accepting and promoting the hyper sexualization of men from the Global South, both the academic and policy worlds have unintentionally constructed categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ refugees. Good refugees are those who can ‘enter society’, as distinguished from deviant refugees who are a risk to their host communities and therefore must be excluded.

Paradoxically, humanitarian interventions into spaces at the micro and macro levels, including interventions into refugee camps and national territories, may ultimately reproduce the forms of violence they seek to eradicate. Such interventions may do this underpinned by narratives that frame the cultures of refugee populations as inherently violent, backward, or underdeveloped. Notably, while the authors do not refute the link between factors such as overcrowding and violence at refugee camps, they challenge the reader to think beyond simplistic blaming explanations for violence – beyond those that assume violence arises from the delinquent cultural norms and practices of displaced populations. They challenge us to inquire into other possible explanations for violence that have arisen out of the process of forced displacement.

The second key contribution of the volume sheds light on what social scientists refer to as “agency” in refugee communities: individuals are not passive spectators of their own lives, but rather have the capacity to act autonomously, make decisions, and to exercise power. While reaffirming that forced displacement is a traumatic experience, the authors show that women, men, and children are not exclusively victims of their circumstances. Rather, they also find ways to navigate their way through various situations riddled with various forms of violence during the process of displacement.

The forcibly displaced individuals are not necessarily safe once they are living in shelters in host countries; instead, they face new and different types of challenges and vulnerabilities. Given that those who flee regularly spend decades in exile, refugee populations generate responses to the risks they face in their new environments. This is important because by bringing refugee agency to the forefront of analyses on refugee life, the authors call into question how top-down humanitarian aid interventions that treat refugees as mere passive victims produce more harm than good. For example, such an approach challenges the humanitarian aid community’s representation of Rohingya culture, which asserts that gender equality is foreign to the Rohingya. As a result, this approach further treats Rohingya advocates for women’s rights as cultural traitors. Secondly, focusing on refugees as agents with the power of self-determination allows us to critique humanitarian programs that largely treat forced migrants as indefinitely dependent on humanitarian assistance rather than capable of developing skills to socially and economically sustain themselves.

The regional focus of the volume in countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe, should not discourage specialists of forced displacement in Latin America. Scholars and practitioners alike will find the chapters underpinned by widely applicable theoretical frameworks and rich evidence that can contribute to more robust explanations of forced migration within the Americas, including but not exclusively limited to the chapters on deportation and land disputes.

At a time when war is one of many causes of forced displacement, Gender, Violence, Refugees is an essential volume. The work’s chapters will encourage the reader to question her assumptions about forced migration, produce new avenues for research, and incentivize humanitarian interventions that do not reproduce stereotypes of refugee communities but rather incorporate ‘bottom-up’ approaches informed by the unique experiences and the long trajectories of migrants.

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style) 

Farfán-Méndez, C. (2020). Book Review: Gender, Violence, Refugees. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2020/02/book-review (Accessed [date])