Introduction: the feminist politics of refugee migration

Abstract

The interdisciplinary field of refugee studies includes gender analyses, but feminism is not its forte. Scholarship in the field has neglected the development of feminist frameworks to trace the power relations that shape the gender and other politics of forced migration. Specifically, the underplayed concept of ‘refugee transnationalism’ is elaborated as a form of globalization where the social and political intersect in particular ways.

El campo interdisciplinario de estudios de refugiados incluye el análisis de género, pero el feminismo no es su fuerte. La investigación en este campo ha desatendido el desarrollo de los marcos feministas para seguir las relaciones de poder que dan forma a las políticas de género y otras sobre migración forzada. Específicamente, el concepto minimizado de ‘transnacionalismo de refugiados’ (Nolin 2006) es elaborado como una forma de globalización donde lo social y lo político se entrecruzan de maneras particulares.

Keywords:

• migration
• refugees
• gender
• feminist
• refugee studies
• transnationalism

Keywords:

• migración
• refugiados
• género
• feminista
• estudios de refugiados
• transnacionalismo

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the authors in this volume for their patience and persistence in seeing this project through. I would like to thank Kasia Grabska and Alice Szczepanikova for their insights and suggestions for this introduction.

Notes

1. Thanks to Lisa Brunner for her assistance in compiling these statistics. Articles include field reports, research notes, debates and refugee voice, but exclude book reviews, obituaries and reports on meetings.

2. Cindy Horst (2006) has demonstrated the extent of these transnational remittance networks between refugee camps and locations of Somali resettlement in the US, Canada and Europe.

3. Durable solution is a technical term employed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to describe sustainable answers to the plight of refugee displacement and temporary lack of access to citizenship in their country of origin. The three conventional durable solutions are, according to UNHCR, 1) voluntary repatriation of refugees to their home countries when it is safe to return; 2) the local integration on a long-term basis of refugees into a neighbouring country that has hosted them on a short-term basis (usually referred to as a first safe country); and 3) resettlement to a third country that is willing to offer permanent residence, stable legal status and normally a pathway to new citizenship in countries such as the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but also including new host states such as Brazil.