Intersectional identities, space and security: Syrian refugee women in Amman and Beirut

Displaced by the Syrian civil war and seeking refuge in the cities of Amman and Beirut, Syrian refugee women face a multitude of complex legal, security, and cultural structures as they attempt to negotiate new lives for themselves. Typically, urban refugee women are overlooked or homogenised into wider descriptions of the situation of refugees. When they are considered as a separate group, they are hemmed into narratives of ‘empowerment’ through their changing gender roles or ‘victims’ of the wider structures of conflict, flight and refuge. As a result, there is a lack of insight into the complexity of these women’s daily, lived experiences, their tactical agency in the face of the powerful structures which shape their lives, and in particular their perceptions and engagement with scalar issues of protection and security in their host cities. Foregrounding the lived experiences of participants through a range of qualitative methods, this thesis explores the relationship between identity, security and space in order to examine the realities of life in the city for Syrian refugee women.
This thesis uses a comparative case study approach, and a range of literatures, including critical realism, intersectionality, tactical agency and feminist geopolitics, in order to highlight how different structures interact with refugee women’s identities to shape differing experiences of (in)security. Whilst policies pertaining to Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon are not gendered at the state level, in the micro day-to-day, the law shapes refugees’ experience in differentiated and gendered ways and has gendered consequences. This results in refugee women occupying a landscape of permitted or prohibited spaces based on policies and legal documentation, which intersect with structural issues of gender and patriarchy. Women negotiate these permitted and prohibited spaces through a range of active and passive tactics, using their agency and the interaction of their various identities in considered ways in order to enhance their mobility, social positioning and wider security in their host cities.