(En)gendering international protection? 'Refugee women', gender and the global politics of asylum

Funder

ESRC

Value

TBC

Collaborators

Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, Toronto University, Melbourne Law School, Paris 8 University, Uppsala University, University of Cape Town, Dokuz Eylul University.

Project team

Professor Heaven Crawley, Professor Deborah Anker (Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program), Professor Audrey Macklin, (Toronto University), Professor Susan Kneebone (Melbourne Law School), Professor Jane Freedman (Paris 8 University), Dr Rebecca Stern (Uppsala University), Fatima Khan (University of Cape Town) and Dr Sibel Safi (Dokuz Eylul University).

Project objectives

Over the past three decades there have been important policy, case law and advocacy developments in relation to gender and international refugee law. To date however these efforts have largely failed to reconfigure the ways in which the experiences of refugee and asylum seeking women are understood and represented. To fill this gap and increase both academic knowledge and policy impact this project will undertake an ambitious programme of comparative research across nine case study countries generating new insights into the framing of gender issues in claims for protection, situated within a broader understanding of the contemporary politics of asylum.

Research impact

The proposed research is ambitious, complex and innovative and has high user impact. For the first time, it brings into dialogue three areas of academic endeavour (feminist legal scholarship, post-colonial feminist scholarship, and the theory and practice of intersectionality) to unpack the framing of gender-based asylum claims within, and across, the case study countries opening up new ways of thinking about gender and international protection, the relationship between international protection and international human rights law and about the ways in which different actors come together to inform and shape the direction of policy and practice. The research also has the potential to shape a deeper and more nuanced application of refugee law more generally, particularly in relation to the intersection between the enumerated Convention grounds.