Displaced Lives: Examining the Intersection of Social Reproduction and (In)security in the Lives of Refugees in India and Turkey
By: Raksha Gopal /she/her) and Luisa Lupo (she/her)
Amal shares her story of displacement, loss, and survival in Turkey due to the war in Syria. “I never thought I would come and live here if it weren’t for the war,” she says over tea in her home in a village near the Turkey-Syria border. She describes feeling “possessed by an evil force” that prevents her from performing daily tasks, like cooking and taking care of her children, adding, “It’s like I’m here but not here.”
Homes within a Rohingya refugee settlement in India, Raksha Gopal, 2023
Thousands of kilometers away, in a Delhi slum, Ajida, a Rohingya refugee displaced from Myanmar, shares similar struggles. Rubbing her pregnant belly, she recounts how her first trimester left her bedridden, unable to care for her firstborn or manage her home. “My husband had to manage everything, but he didn’t do it very well,” she admits. Yet, Ajida worries about the future, asking, “Will my grandchildren also be refugees?”
For both Amal and Ajida, displacement has changed their roles as parents by increasing their care responsibilities. The Rohingyas are stateless refugees who fled religious persecution in Myanmar. Many of them now live in India, where they continue to face marginalization. Refugees from Syria fled the civil war. A large percentage lives in Turkey, facing multiple legal and socio-economic vulnerabilities.
Our article looks at experiences of social reproduction – those daily practices, often performed by women, that sustain life – in the insecure conditions of prolonged displacement. We were inspired to write it through several years of collaboration while both of us were conducting field research for our PhDs in India and Turkey. It struck us that despite the different contexts and diverse refugee communities we were working with, refugees faced common struggles to survive and rebuild their lives as they navigate their exclusion from citizenship and formal labor markets.
We argue that for people and communities enduring prolonged displacement and violence, social reproduction becomes essential to survival. Specifically, it involves practices aimed at fostering a sense for security for oneself and one’s family (‘making secure’) through home-making and daily care routines when faced with the multiple insecurities of displacement. These latter include precarious living conditions, financial hardship, un- or under-employment, and threats of detention and deportation, among others.
Home of a Syrian refugee family in Turkey, Luisa Lupo, 2022
We also introduce the concept of ‘(in)securitization of social reproduction’ to show that state and non-state actors both hinder and support social reproduction, for instance, through humanitarian and development interventions, as well as routine surveillance within refugees’ homes and settlements. Faced with these challenges, our research shows that refugees must innovate and strategize to secure their social reproduction, such as maintaining ties with NGOs, avoiding certain places where they might be apprehended, or making themselves visible through registration with humanitarian actors that can provide them with support. However, this process can also exacerbate their insecurity by exposing them to greater insecurities and harm from the state and by restricting their ability to sustain their social reproduction further.
For us, thinking through experiences of displacement in different contexts, has been useful to clarify and deepen our understanding of social reproduction, a popular concept in feminist political economy. It also allowed us to recognize the importance of these experiences of (in)security to social reproduction.
Our article draws on several months of interviews and participant observations conducted between 2022 and 2024. It is the product of numerous collaborations, including feedback from interpreters, refugee research participants, and local informants, which have opened new questions for us on research ethics and epistemic justice. While working in sensitive contexts and with research participants who are navigating multiple insecurities, power relations between researchers and research participants are inevitable and require ongoing reflection on our positionality and safeguarding participants from harm. Following calls for thinking more deeply about ways to build transnational connections across different empirical contexts, we offer this intersection of social reproduction, (in)security and survival as a starting point to interrogate certain concepts from the ground-up.
We would like to express our gratitude to the refugees who participated in our research and shared their stories with us.
Read the full article here: Displaced lives: rethinking survival, social reproduction, and (in)security with refugees
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Raksha Gopal is a PhD candidate International Relations/Political Science and a researcher at the Gender Centre for the project Gendering Survival from the Margins at the Geneva Graduate Institute (Switzerland). Her research focuses on forced displacements in the Global South, the securitization of migration, and gender.
Luisa Lupo is a PhD candidate in International Relations/Political Science and a researcher at the Gender Centre for the project Gendering Survival from the Margins at the Geneva Graduate Institute (Switzerland). Her research focuses on issues related to gender, social reproduction and the everyday lives of households, as well as rights and contestations in the globalized neoliberal economy.