Palestinian Refugee Women from Syria to Jordan - by Afaf Jabiri

About the Book

"Previous work on the Syrian refugee crisis has overlooked the experiences of Palestinian refugee women and has failed to examine the gendered processes of humanitarianism. This has weakened transnational and intersectional feminist solidarity. In this book Afaf Jabiri examines the experiences of Palestinian women from Syria displaced to Jordan and argues for a feminist analysis of settler-colonialism, particularly in the case of second displacement. Based on four years of field research in camps in Jordan - including interviews with Palestinian refugee women, aid workers, and representatives of international organisations and NGOs in Jordan - the book highlights how local women's groups and frontline workers attempt to fill service gaps. The book reveals how these groups have challenged state politics, the selectivity of aid, and the politics of the gendered development approach in humanitarian settings. Jabiri also argues that local resistance, although important, needs backing by transnational feminist solidarity and actions. Hence this book offers a vital critique to feminists' adoption of a feminist universality-based analysis of the Syrian refugee crisis, which has weakened local feminist and women's rights groups' resistance efforts and contributed to the further marginalisation of Palestinian refugee women from Syria. Using a rich theoretical lens to understand the experiences of women in refugee camps, this book attempts to decolonise issues around migration, displacement, refugees and women"--

Book Synopsis

Based on four years of field research in Palestinian camps in Jordan - including unique interviews with Palestinian refugee women, aid workers, and representatives of international organisations and NGOs in Jordan - the book reveals the extraordinary layers of discrimination suffered by Palestinian women from Syria displaced to Jordan.

The women's experiences show them caught between settler colonialism, militarism, nationalism, refugees' global governance and gender regimes that subjected them to multiple forms of structural gender-based violence. The book argues for a feminist analysis of settler colonialism's epistemic violence of anti-Palestinianism to expose the history and geopolitics of intersecting oppressive systems that work through and upon gendered bodies of Palestinian refugee women in humanitarian settings. The book also highlights how local women's groups and frontline workers attempt to fill service gaps. Using a rich theoretical lens to understand the experiences of women in refugee camps, this book attempts to decolonise issues around migration, displacement, refugees and women.

Previous work on the Syrian refugee crisis has overlooked the very particular experiences of Palestinian refugee women, which has weakened feminist analysis of gendered processes of humanitarianism, and feminist transnational and intersectional solidarity. This book offers a vital critique of how feminists' adoption of a universality-based analysis of the Syrian refugee crisis has contributed to the further marginalisation of Palestinian refugee women from Syria.

Review Quotes

"This is a luminous book of courage and stoicism in women's voices from a hidden world of cruelties.
Meticulous research and analysis reveal unique structural and gendered discrimination and violence
faced in Jordan by Palestinian refugee women and girls from Syria. This is a new and shocking indictment of the failure of the UN and international aid agencies to protect." --Victoria Brittain, a former foreign correspondent and Associate Foreign Editor of The Guardian.

"Thanks to her unique access, Afaf Jabiri sheds a much-needed light on the lived experiences of Palestinian women attempting to escape war-torn Syria and finding themselves rejected at Jordan's borders. The women's stories in this book are a painful and lucid portrayal of what it means to be undesirable, as the core of a "Palestinian condition" . This book is a must read for anyone interested in how racism in the form of anti-Palestinianism impacts the lives and identities of a multiple times displaced population." --Ruba Salih, Professor, University of Bologna, Italy

About the Author

Afaf Jabiri is Senior Lecturer of Development Studies at the University of East London, UK. She has previously held teaching positions at the Centre for Gender Studies, SOAS, UK and the Gender Institute, LSE, UK. She is the author of Gendered Politics and Law in Jordan: Guardianship over Women (2016) and Palestinian refugee Women from Syria to Jordan: Decolonising the Geopolitics of Displacement (2023).