Conflict-affected women on the move: From the conflict zone to the militarised borderland

Since the beginning of 2015, a rising number of women and girls have attempted a perilous and often deadly journey to reach Europe through the sea or surrounding countries in the Mediterranean area, contributing to what is referred to in media and policy discourses as Europe's refugee crisis.Footnote ¹⁸ In 2016, the UN Refugee Agency estimated that women, together with minors, counted for nearly 60 per cent of migrants arriving at Europe's borders, many of whom were forcibly displaced by war.Footnote ¹⁹ While the presence of asylum seekers at the borders of Europe is not new, violent conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea, and Somalia increased the absolute number of forcibly displaced people in recent years, the proportion of women among them, and overall levels of insecurity experienced at the borders of Europe.Footnote ²⁰ Women experience distinct and acute forms of insecurity, and face higher rates of mortality than men.Footnote ²¹ Due to the closing down of borders, women who attempt to journey towards and across Europe are increasingly reliant on smugglers, rendering them more vulnerable to abuse or sexual exploitation as payment for their passage.Footnote ²² For women who make it to reception and transit centres, new challenges emerge in the form of rampant gender-based violence (GBV), including sexual violence, early and forced marriage, and domestic violence. Governmental agencies are often not able to prevent or respond to these gendered forms of violence in meaningful ways.Footnote ²³ Police and security forces have, at times, exacerbated conditions of insecurity, as they have committed gender-based violence against displaced women, which has been met with little action at national or EU level.Footnote ²⁴

The violence and insecurity experienced by forcibly displaced women partly stem from serious shortcomings in the implementation of gender-sensitive refugee and asylum policies, as reported by scholars and human rights agencies. These include inadequate housing conditions at reception centres, particularly insufficient provision of gender-segregated sleeping, hygiene, and recreation facilities. Thus, when visiting an overcrowded refugee reception centre in Greece in the summer of 2018, a group of researchers was surprised to discover a pile of discarded water bottles filled with urine.Footnote ²⁵ Their guide informed them that asylum seekers residing in the centre – particularly women and girls – were using water bottles as makeshift toilets to avoid leaving their tent at night and exposing themselves to kidnapping and sexual assault. While it was possible for a woman to ask to be moved to a safe zone, this could only happen once she had already experienced violence on site.Footnote ²⁶ This anecdote points to a broader cluster of problems that cultivate insecurity among women refugees, including policies delaying or hampering family and spousal reunification; inadequate mechanisms for reporting sexual and domestic violence; and an alarming lack of state-led data gathering on gender-based violence.Footnote ²⁷

The reported insecurity of refugee women and girls fleeing conflict suggests that prevalent understandings of the conflict-affected woman should be broadened in two ways to better attend to the gendered impacts of displacement. First, while WPS policy has often attached conflict-affectedness to geographic zones understood as areas marked by conflict, this alternative reading suggests that conflict-affectedness also attaches to people on the move. This understanding emerges from a place of attention to the long-term impact of war in the country of origin on women displaced by conflict. As explained by Allami in her speech, forced displacement is an important and frequent consequence of war for women. Fleeing, while often necessary to escape death, generates intense insecurity for displaced populations. It exposes them to the problems of homelessness including unreliable and inconsistent access to water and food, shelter from the elements, and healthcare, not to mention dangerous travel routes, in environments marked by scarcity and uncertainty.

As Allami mentions, those who flee conflict also carry physical and/or emotional trauma from the violence that they have witnessed or experienced,Footnote ²⁸ a trauma often sustained or worsened by the very circumstances of displacement. The physical and psychological wounds of war are not necessarily dissipated by migration. They often accompany survivors to their new place of dwelling, however remote from the conflict zone. Activists addressing a privileged audience, like Allami at the Security Council, will often draw on notions of trauma that emphasise the impact of a single event on an individual, such as the violent destruction of one's village. Such notions of trauma nonetheless rely on the assumption that people primarily experience life-threatening insecurity during punctual events. In contrast, forcibly displaced women experience insecurity on a chronic basis. This chronic insecurity is in itself traumatic, as argued by feminists from the Global South, for whom event-based notions of trauma are Western-centric. For displaced women, the daily struggle for food, water, and safety is often a greater challenge to the psyche than isolated events such as rape or the murder of a loved one, however damaging on their own terms.Footnote ²⁹

Although displaced people of all genders experience intense hardship, gender mediates the security risks involved in forced displacement. Travelling alone, or without male kin, can be stigmatising for women in contexts where a woman's social standing is reliant on her ties to a family or kinship group. This stigma in turn can make her vulnerable to violence, including sexual violence. This, in turn, can lead to pregnancies at moments when women are unlikely to receive appropriate reproductive care. If we take into account these various and gendered forms of insecurity involved in women's experiences of conflict-induced forced displacement, we may understand conflict-affectedness as a characteristic that attaches itself to bodies and human lives. In this new understanding, conflict-affectedness is a condition that extends to women fleeing war to seek refuge away from their country of origin, including in countries not traditionally understood as in conflict. This would notably include women who have flown conflict and are seeking refuge in Europe.

Second, an attentiveness to the forms of militarised violence at Europe's borders gives cause to reconsider what counts as conflict, and where women are conflict-affected. WPS policy typically relies on a conventional notion of conflict as ‘the use of armed force between two parties’.Footnote ³⁰ This notion can, however, be productively broadened to include forms of violence and insecurity experienced by marginalised subjects outside the context of ‘war’ conventionally defined.Footnote ³¹ In the last decade, Europe has fortressed itself to wage what some have called a war against immigration.Footnote ³² European rhetoric on border control has become militarised, referring to a combat against a ‘territorial invasion’.Footnote ³³ The related material militarisation of border regimes has led to what resembles a military confrontation, albeit one in which European armed border guards oppose mostly unarmed and impoverished migrants who find themselves much more vulnerable to injury and death.Footnote ³⁴ At least 36,570 migrants and refugees died at Europe's borders between 1993 and 2019Footnote ³⁵ and an estimated 8,793 migrants died at sea in 2015–16 alone.Footnote ³⁶ As the vast majority of the deceased come from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, fortress Europe has been described as waging a war marked by ‘the utter disposability of black and brown lives’.Footnote ³⁷ Thus, women who flee Syria, Afghanistan, or other war zones and attempt to enter Europe may be understood as doubly affected by conflict: in the country of origin and at the border. Conventional notions of conflict as temporally contained event or geographically static condition are insufficient to thinking seriously about how refugee women are affected by conflict across time and location. In contrast, thinking about the ‘conflict-affected woman on the move’ affords the conceptual flexibility required, and continues broader feminist efforts to rethink what counts as ‘war’ and ‘conflict’ from the perspective of women's lived experiences.Footnote ³⁸

Asylum seekers are particularly vulnerable to violence and death because they occupy a liminal and insecure space that resembles Gloria Anzaldúa's description of the borderland: ‘a vague and undetermined place … in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.’Footnote ³⁹ This borderland refers not only to their geopolitical location at Europe's borders; it is also produced by the marginality of gender to asylum processes. Conflict-affected women remain stuck in the borderland for several reasons. Gender-specific forms of vulnerability (such as the threat of sexual assault) are often not recognised by gender-blind asylum laws and policies.Footnote ⁴⁰ Moreover, in countries like the United Kingdom, the closing down of borders involves delays in family reunification.Footnote ⁴¹ Many women whose husbands and partners have immigrated are left behind if not abandoned, leaving them isolated, impoverished, and more vulnerable to violence and exploitation. For these reasons, the conflict-affected woman on the move is vulnerable to many forms of violence and trauma. She is akin to Anzaldúa's border woman in the poem that opened this section: on a thin edge of barbwire.

However, and as many WPS activists and femocrats keenly emphasise, conflict-affected women are also creative, ingenious, and agentic human beings who have both the capacity and the right to productively contribute to security policymaking – including after they flee to a foreign country. In her speech, Allami insisted that ‘women must fully participate and be consulted systematically in decision-making, across all displacement settings, in humanitarian programming, and, of course, in the broader political, security and peace processes’.Footnote ⁴² This intervention builds on a well-anchored concern with women's political participation in the WPS context, where women's rights activists have successfully established a representation of the woman-in-conflict ‘as someone who is empowered and not simply a victim’.Footnote ⁴³ Ever since its inception, the WPS agenda has not only advocated an increased protection of women's human rights, but also women's participation in all matters relating to peace and security and the inclusion of women in conflict prevention. By pairing protection with participation, the WPS agenda contains the demand that women are seen as subjects capable of agency – that is, as subjects able to critically reflect and act on their conditions.Footnote ⁴⁴ In this sense, the WPS agenda provides the grounds for recognising, as feminist theorising on agency insists we should, that agency and coercion are not mutually exclusive conditions, but rather exist simultaneously, in complex relation to one another.Footnote ⁴⁵ Agency can coexist with vulnerability and oppression; the need for protection does not substitute the right to participation.

This approach is markedly distinct from existing gender provisions in refugee law, and asylum and migration policy, including in the European context. The latter have historically exhibited a tendency to depoliticise women by limiting recognition of their political agency to that enacted by male relatives.Footnote ⁴⁶ Consequently, whenever traditional refugee policy and legal texts consider women, it frames them as passive victims. Similarly, the European media has often framed women refugees as voiceless and victimised.Footnote ⁴⁷ The weight of these cultural representations is such that even after Allami had enjoined Member States and leading security organisations to ensure the full protection, participation and consultation of women on peace and security matters ‘across all displacement settings’, the NGO and diplomatic community embraced first and foremost the objective of better protecting refugee women.Footnote ⁴⁸ Several diplomats highlighted actions taken by their country to open up their domestic asylum policies and processes, while others reaffirmed the principles of international protection of asylum seekers.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 2016, the NGO Working Group on WPS requested, on behalf of 253 civil society organisations from around the world, that Member States ‘implement effective asylum and legal protection mechanisms in accordance with international law; remove gender discriminatory nationality laws; and protect women and girls from sexual and gender-based violence while in transit and in final destinations’.Footnote ⁵⁰ This shows how difficult it is even for activists to find language that supports a view of women refugees as agentic and worthy of political inclusion – this language simply does not exist in the existing legal framework around asylum and refugees.

In contrast, the WPS agenda's existing figure of the conflict-affected woman is simultaneously vulnerable and agentic. This, we argue, is the key distinctive advantage of WPS over migration and asylum policy. In spite of all its imperfections and shortcomings at the implementation level, the WPS agenda contains a core commitment to recognising and promoting conflict-affected women's agency and participation, a commitment that may now be extended to conflict-affected on the move. The NGO Working Group for WPS accomplished a new push in this direction in 2017, when it nominated the Danish activist Mina Jaf to address the Security Council on its behalf. Jaf was born a refugee in Iraqi Kurdistan. She came into the world as her mother escaped a chemical attack launched on her village in the context of the war between Iran and Iraq. When Jaf was 14, her family was granted asylum in Denmark. At the time of her allocution, Jaf had grown into a young woman, and the funder and leader of a non-governmental organisation that supports women refugees and provides gender training to personnel who work with refugees in several European countries.Footnote ⁵¹ Jaf's allocution at the Security Council emphasised both victimhood, through the narration of her flight from a warzone as a girl, and agency, in the form of her current leadership role in refugee action. By making visible women like Jaf, the NGO Working Group on WPS is productively supporting more complex representations of refugee women, and showing that they are not only victims but also active political agents.

Having established the potential benefits of an emergent reconceptualisation, in WPS advocacy, of the conflict-affected woman as also referring to the woman who flees conflict and journeys across borders in search of increased safety, we ask, to what extent does national WPS policy construct the conflict-affected woman as a transnationally mobile subject, and with what effects? While this question is of global relevance, we focus our inquiry on Europe. European states are influential actors in the field of WPS, in which they often self-present as leaders and role models. For instance, the UK proudly boasts a ‘strong domestic and international record on women and girls’ that positions it as a ‘global leader’ in the field of WPS and gender equality more generally.Footnote ⁵² The Nordic states also ‘see themselves as the leaders of the WPS agenda’.Footnote ⁵³ Finland for instance asserts its status as ‘a pioneer and expert of gender equality issues’.Footnote ⁵⁴ European states articulate this special expertise as enabling them to lead and advise other countries or international agencies whom they support in the implementation of the WPS agenda and in developing their own action plans.Footnote ⁵⁵ While positioning themselves as trendsetters, European states have addressed forced displacement in national action plans (NAPs) on WPS with uneven levels of enthusiasm and thoroughness. In the UK, academics and NGOs were notably unsuccessful in advocating the inclusion of provisions regarding facilitated family reunification, expanded resettlement programmes, and the sensitisation of hosting communities in the UK's most recent NAP.Footnote ⁵⁶

This reluctance exposes a tension between the normative commitment of the WPS agenda to protect and include conflict-affected women in matters pertaining to international security on the one hand, and the geopolitical imaginaries on which WPS policy is built on the other hand. WPS policy frameworks have been ostensibly designed to make the needs and concerns of conflict-affected women visible and politically salient and European governments have overwhelmingly endorsed those frameworks. Those governments are ready to voice support and dedicate resources to protect and include the conflict-affect woman when she is in the zone of conflict. Once the same conflict-affected women moves towards Europe, their support is withdrawn, leading to an apparent normative inconsistency. As we interrogate this tension, we, the authors, also interrogate our own practices as academics who were once practitioners involved in designing and implementing WPS policy in an international foundation based in Europe. Conflict-affected women on the move were not, so to say, on our radar back then, and this seemed natural. We hereby document new efforts to include displaced women in WPS discourse, but also interrogate what the terms of inclusion (and of exclusion) reveal about the foundations of this discourse.

Methodology: Investigating the borderlands of WPS policy

Our inquiry proceeds through a content and discourse analysis of WPS policy, as articulated in NAPs and regional action plans. The content analysis allows us to trace, quantitatively, how often questions of forced displacement arise in WPS policy and which actors are most likely to include forced displacement as a concern. We worked with three datasets: (1) a global dataset of 55 national action plans (assembled in 2016); (2) a more up to date European dataset of 22 national action plans (assembled in 2018); and (3) a global dataset of 5 regional action plans (assembled in 2018). The first dataset, produced by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), includes all mentions of forced displacement found in the 55 NAPs on WPS available in 2016 in English or French. A NAP is found to mention forced displacement when it contains any of the following 11 terms: asylum, displace(d/ment), IDP(s), migrant(s), migration, on the move, refuge(es), stateless(ness), flee, border, and returnee.Footnote ⁵⁷ These mentions relate to different legal migratory categories, but we use the term ‘refugee’ in a generic sense, referring to persons seeking refuge.Footnote ⁵⁸ As we are especially interested in the content of European NAPs, we produced a second, more up to date dataset containing the most recent NAP of each European country that ever adopted such a document, that is, 22 NAPs adopted between 2007 and 2018 (see Figure 1). We searched these NAPs for the same 11 keywords related to forced displacement, thus reproducing the UNHCR approach for a more up to date set of NAPs.

Figure 1.

Mentions of refugees in European national action plans (n = 22, 2018).

Note: The following European countries did not have a NAP as of 2018: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, and Slovakia.

We primarily focus on NAPs because they are commonly regarded as the major mechanism of policy diffusion for the WPS agenda, and one that allows us to trace how the normative framework on WPS has evolved globally.Footnote ⁵⁹ The vast majority of NAPs are adopted as government policy. Sometimes a single ministry (typically Foreign Affairs) will be in charge of designing the NAP; sometimes the NAP receives input from several ministries (such as Defence, Cooperation and Development, Internal Security, and/or Immigration). Parliament will often be consulted either as the NAP is being developed, or following its adoption, to provide oversight over its implementation. Despite variations from state to state, all NAPs benefit from the authority, influence, and resources associated with the state. They give us information about how state agents imagine their own identity and follow a similar template that helpfully allows for comparison. Like states, regional organisations also adopt action plans on WPS. Our third dataset includes action plans of five regional organisations (the EU, NATO, the Economic Community of West African States, the Pacific States, and the League of Arab States), which allowed us to compare the EU action plan with other regional action plans, and check whether tendencies at the state level were also reflected at the regional level.

Our content analysis started with a keyword search for forced displacement issues in datasets 2 (European NAPs 2018) and 3 (Regional Action Plans 2018). We employed the same keyword search developed by UNHCR for dataset 1, mentioned above. This allowed us to assess, first of all, which nation states and regional organisations attend to the conflict-affected woman on the move. Second, for all documents that coded positive in this first step, we examined whether they framed forced displacement as (a) a domestic issue; (b) a foreign issue; or (c) both a foreign and domestic issue. This analysis of WPS policy documents provides a quantitative transnational comparison that allows us to map the extent to which Europe includes forced displacement in its WPS policy and whether they do in a domestic or foreign policy context, and how it compares to the rest of the world (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Visibility of refugees in national action plans on Women, Peace and Security (n=55, 2016).

As a proxy for Europe, we use the European Economic Area (EEA) – the 28 EU Member States and 4 non-EU members of the European Free Trade Area (Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland). While defining Europe in this way paradoxically reproduces a form of bordering, the EEA is the best proxy as it is productive of the European border regime.Footnote ⁶⁰ In providing for the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital within the single market, it produces a relaxation of border controls within its area, while simultaneously producing a hardening of external borders, thereby constituting what is experienced as ‘fortress Europe’ by those who seek to enter it. Since the fortressing of borders is also salient in non-European countries such as Australia and the US, we compare trends in Europe thus defined to trends in the Global North. We use membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)Footnote ⁶¹ as an imperfect proxy for distinguishing Global North and Global South countries.

We then proceed to a poststructuralist discourse analysis of forced displacement in European WPS policy, including dataset 2 and the EU regional action plan. Using discourse analysis allows us to map how European WPS policy constructs the conflict-affected woman on the move, and what logics (or rationales) underlie either her inclusion or exclusion from WPS policy frameworks. First, we scrutinise how WPS policy defines her as a subject (for example, as passive victim or active agent; as residing within and/or outside Europe). Second, we attend to how these documents imagine the relationship between European governments and the conflict-affected woman on the move, particularly whether this relationship is based on political participation and/or protection – two central pillars of WPS. Third, we consider how the construction of both the conflict-affected woman on the move and the national self either fixes or troubles conventional constructions of European identity and the imagined border between Europe and the rest of the world.

Poststructuralist discourse analysis has often been used to expose the mutually constitutive and socially constructed character of hierarchical binaries that are otherwise taken for granted as common sense categories.Footnote ⁶² We are particularly interested in the domestic/foreign binary, and how it connects to two other binaries: peaceful/violent, and gender-progressive/patriarchal.Footnote ⁶³ As we will show, these binaries structure Europe's WPS policy in relation to forced displacement in a way that sustains unequal power structures of world politics. In a fashion typical of discourse analysis, we challenge their supposed fixity to explore alternative possibilities.Footnote ⁶⁴ In so doing, we draw inspiration from Anzaldúa's call to cultivate mestiza consciousness, a border thinking that involves cultivating a tolerance for ambiguity through ‘a massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Logics of inclusion: Refugees as a domestic concern in Europe's national action plans

Our first and most important finding is that an important minority of European states do include the conflict-affected woman on the move within their WPS policy frameworks, and explicitly construct her as a subject of concern even after she leaves the war zone and journeys towards or within Europe. As many as nine European countries, or 41 per cent of European countries with a NAP, include obligations regarding refugees who are within and at their borders in their WPS policy (see Figure 1). Some action plans emphasise the novelty of including refugee women in Europe within the remit of WPS and justify this change on the basis of the recent crises in the Mediterranean area. Thus, the government of Finland now considers that ‘the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria and the refugee crisis affecting Europe have made the themes discussed within the framework of Women, Peace and Security topical issues for European countries’, including in ‘sectors where domestic actors operate’.Footnote ⁶⁶

The logics that underlie the inclusion of displaced women in Europe within the WPS policy of these nine countries pertain to two pillars of the WPS agenda: participation of women in peace and security decision-making and protection from GBV. We start with participation. Some NAPs recommend the integration of women as border guards and other professionals attached to the reception of asylum seekers.Footnote ⁶⁷ The presence of women in these positions can contribute to a safer environment for women and girls asylum seekers, for instance in the conduct of body searches, health checks, or the provision of advice through helplines.Footnote ⁶⁸ The concern for participation also sometimes usefully extends to the inclusion of women asylum seekers in decision-making and policy review, whereas others articulate a broader concern to engage civil society organisations, particularly those representing the interests of refugee, migrant, and diaspora women.Footnote ⁶⁹ This concern with the participation and empowerment of conflict-affected women living in Europe mirrors similar provisions for supporting women refugees in developing countries, for instance by enhancing their economic situation and furthering their participation in decision-making.Footnote ⁷⁰

Participation is the area where a WPS approach allows for the most innovation in comparison to existing migration and refugee regimes. The aforementioned prescriptions in WPS policy exceed the protection-focused commitments of refugee law and asylum regimes, as they also include a participatory dimension. Civil society organisations have been at the forefront of developing such a focus on the empowerment, inclusion, and consultation of refugee women in Europe. In Ireland, AkiDwA, an organisation advocating on behalf of migrant women, lobbied for the inclusion of migrant women in Defence and Police Forces, funding for programmes that would connect diaspora women from armed conflict zones who now live in Ireland, and education opportunities.Footnote ⁷¹ Ireland's NAP has taken some of these recommendations on board.Footnote ⁷² This example demonstrates the possibility of policy frameworks seeing the conflict-affected woman on the move as not only a vulnerable person in need of protection, but also as an agentic actor in possession of relevant knowledge to inform policymaking.Footnote ⁷³ Such inclusion, in the NAPs of countries like Ireland and Germany,Footnote ⁷⁴ foresees collaborative deliberation with refugee women on their needs and priorities, and thereby creates possibilities for refugee women to participate in the formulation of policies that affect them.Footnote ⁷⁵

European NAPs nonetheless remain more likely to invoke the need to protect refugee women and girls from GBV as a leading rationale for their inclusion within WPS policy. The NAPs identify different phases of the asylum process in which the needs and vulnerabilities of women and girls are to be considered, from the handling of asylum requests and the design of reception policies and infrastructures to resettlement and integration programmes. For example, the French NAP commits to increasing the ‘consideration of issues linked to gender and violence against women in asylum procedures’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Belgium's NAP details measures taken to ensure that women who seek asylum in Belgium benefit from gender-sensitive policies, including with regard to accommodation, health, and resettlement in Belgium.Footnote ⁷⁷ Some NAPs also outline measures related to staffing, such as gender training for professionals involved in service provision to asylum seekers.Footnote ⁷⁸ This emphasis on protection legitimately draws attention to the insecurity of asylum seekers at the borders of Europe.

We suggest, however, that the inclusion of refugees in WPS policy should emphasise both protection and participation of displaced women in decision-making. As feminists have pointed out, the exclusion of certain agents (in this case, refugees) from a space ‘exposes the need for a power shift’, but inclusion is not always in and of itself sufficient to bring about such a power shift. Inclusion sometimes only allows ‘a partial renegotiation of the gendering and racing power’.Footnote ⁷⁹ In the case of WPS policy, an inclusion of refugee women that solely focuses on protection does not favour reciprocal relations between refugee women and European states. It repositions European states as protective heroes and conflict-affected women as helpless victims. For example, the Czech NAP stresses that women and girl migrants are among the most vulnerable groups, and therefore in need of special protection. This in turn calls for the state to take measures to prevent trafficking, GBV, and gender-based exclusion.Footnote ⁸⁰ Such measures are certainly necessary. However, a sole focus on protection at the expense of participation negates refugee women's capacity and right to shape their own conditions of living and to participate in decision-making on security matters. It reproduces a common stereotype of suffering, helplessness, and oppression that negates the complex and diverse sets of experiences, skills, and capacities of conflict-affected women on the move – a stereotype also often extended to LGBTQ refugees from Syria.Footnote ⁸¹

An inclusion of refugee women in WPS policy that solely emphasises protection measures also problematically reasserts Europe's position as the competent, willing, and heroic protector of both white and brown women.Footnote ⁸² This framing obscures the responsibility or complicity of European states in creating some of the insecurity experienced by women and girl refugees in the first place.Footnote ⁸³ Most strikingly, none of the NAPs mention the well-established need to introduce and enforce codes of conduct to prevent sexual harassment and abuse by border guards and other security practitioners interacting with refugees, or ensure the functioning and integrity of complaints mechanisms designed to report such cases.Footnote ⁸⁴ While the Spanish NAP commits to enforce a zero-tolerance policy for sexual exploitation and abuse among security personnel deployed abroad, it curiously does not extend the scope of this policy to personnel working with asylum seekers at the domestic level.Footnote ⁸⁵ Nor did we find commitments to revise legal frameworks on the situation of refugee women who hold visas based on their spouse's refugee status, and whose ability to press charges against an abusive spouse is compromised by their fear of losing their right to remain in the host country.Footnote ⁸⁶

Interestingly, Spain and Italy both recognise European society as a potential threat to refugees. The former mandates public information campaigns on refugee integration, and the latter requests the monitoring of hate crimes directed at women refugees.Footnote ⁸⁷ These policies thus recognise that refugee women and girls may sometimes face insecurity coming from within Europe. While these NAPs reposition European governments as protecting refugees against misguided elements of the host population, they productively trouble the assumption that violent threats against conflict-affected women emanate exclusively or primarily from outside Europe. The next section examines this assumption, which partly underlies some states’ decision to exclude the women forcibly displaced in Europe from their WPS framework.

Logics of exclusion: Refugees as a foreign policy concern in Europe's national action plans

In the majority of European action plans, refugee women in Europe or at its borders remain absent and invisible. Out of 22 NAPs in Europe, 13 remain silent on the violence experienced by forcibly displaced women in Europe, such as incarceration, sexual violence in refugee centres, and/or deportation back to the war zones that they have escaped. Similarly, the EU Action Plan does not address these policy failures and implementation gaps in domestic migration and asylum frameworks. The key rationale for omitting forced displacement in or near Europe from WPS policies is the idea that WPS is a foreign policy area. For example, successive iterations of the British NAP have specified: ‘this National Action Plan is focused overseas’, and ‘the NAP is internationally focused’.Footnote ⁸⁸ During a consultation with academics in August 2017, UK government representatives reasserted this position: the NAP is a foreign policy document focused on ‘conflict-affected states’.Footnote ⁸⁹ The UK government has long supported the idea that the WPS framework has no domestic implication, including in Northern Ireland. This position contrasts with that of feminist academics and women's rights activists, who understand Northern Ireland as a site of conflict, and one in which women continue to be sidelined despite their mobilisation for peace.Footnote ⁹⁰

The UK identifies refugees as a population of concern in ‘focus countries’ such as South Sudan, but not at home.Footnote ⁹¹ Similarly, Denmark outlines ongoing support to an NGO working with Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan, but no similar activities in Denmark itself.Footnote ⁹² In total, seven NAPs address forced displacement in the Global South only (see Figure 1). Likewise, the EU's regional action plan highlights women's forced displacement in places like Darfur but not in Europe itself.Footnote ⁹³ While pursuing this research, we have also met researchers and activists who considered that although the failures of the immigration and asylum regimes are alarming, it makes sense to address these through those existing frameworks, and preserve WPS as a foreign policy agenda.

It is nonetheless necessary to interrogate the supposed naturalness of treating WPS as foreign policy, since like all things taken to be common sense it is a social construction made natural through habit. It is first worth noting that this is a distinctly European attitude. Outside of Europe, it is very common for questions of asylum, migration, and forced displacement to be included in WPS policy, including in relation to the domestic context. Globally, 76 per cent of NAPs mention forced displacement, compared to only 68 per cent in European states (see Figure 2). Moreover, countries located outside of Europe more willingly address forced displacement as a domestic concern. Globally, 62 per cent of NAPs mention refugees within, or at the borders of the host nation, compared to only 41 per cent in Europe. Europe's position is therefore, compared to global WPS policy, unusual and worth interrogating.

We suggest that Europe's greater tendency to treat WPS as foreign policy relies on and reproduces two problematic assumptions: that Europe is peaceful; and that Europe is gender-progressive. First, the framing of WPS as foreign policy, and thus not concerned with refugees close to home, is premised upon an understanding that WPS addresses conflict, and that conflict is something that happens elsewhere, namely in the Global South. In Europe as more generally in the Global North, WPS policy often locates conflict outside of their national boundaries.Footnote ⁹⁴ This framing mirrors the Security Council Resolutions, which circumscribe attention to refugee women to those physically located in the geographic zones of conflict on its agenda. This notion of conflict zone, actively policed by the five permanent members, borrows from tropes cultivated in media and government discourse that construct the South as less modern, less developed, and less peaceful, and links the Global North to notions of peace and security.Footnote ⁹⁵ In other words, the borders of Europe generally do not appear to qualify as a conflict zone within WPS discourse because the latter is premised on a notion of conflict constructed by the permanent members of the Council to protect the sovereignty of Northern countries, particularly their own. It is largely as a result of such policing moves that the WPS agenda has imagined conflict-affected women as located in the South. This explains why only 50 per cent of NAPs produced in the Global North mention forced displacement as a domestic issue, against 72 per cent in the South (see Figure 2). The WPS agenda borrows from a broader security-development discourse that imagines security problems to be located exclusively in the South.Footnote ⁹⁶ In this discourse, Northern states and actors are imagined as exporting solutions. Thus, 71 per cent of Northern NAPs construct forced displacement as a foreign policy issue, compared to only 17 per cent of Southern NAPs. The problem, of course, is that such a framing obscures Northern responsibilities in fostering conditions of economic inequality, authoritarianism, and environmental degradation in the South, all of which fuel conflict on a global scale.Footnote ⁹⁷

Second, European WPS policy has often been premised on the assumption that Europe is already performing gender-responsive protection, which makes European countries even less likely than the rest of the Global North to acknowledge the vulnerability of forcibly displaced women on their own territory. Indeed, although 50 per cent of NAPs produced in the Global North consider forced displacement in the domestic context, this is only the case for 41 per cent of European NAPs. As discussed earlier, European states see themselves as global leaders in the field of women's rights.Footnote ⁹⁸ Their interventions frame gender-progressiveness as a normative ideal on the world stage, which is in many ways beneficial, as is the transnational sharing of resources and successful practices to promote gender equality objectives. This conviction is to some extent well founded. The EU and (by extension) European countries have a robust policy framework addressing gendered concerns in forced migration. Since 2015, countries like Iceland, Latvia, Croatia, and Italy have also adopted new laws mandating gender-sensitive support for asylum seekers, gender training for security personnel working with refugees, and asylum procedures conducted by officials capable of assessing gender-specific forms of vulnerability.Footnote ⁹⁹ However, on the ground, the insecurity faced by conflict-affected women at the borders of Europe reminds us that severe shortcomings remain. In such a context, framing WPS as strictly foreign policy, and excluding the conflict-affected women on the move from its remit, is a construction that mainly serves to obscure European states’ failures to perform their idealised selves: the peace-loving protector of vulnerable women.

Obscuring these failures is itself a way of hardening the borders by reproducing imagined distinctions between the European self and the Southern other. As Anzaldúa theorises, borders are not simply geographic facts; they are socially produced and politically productive, in the sense that they are ‘set up to define places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Thus, the notion of Europe's refugee ‘crisis’ does not only refer to the tragedy of lives violently uprooted and too often lost at sea, but also to the destabilisation of Europe's security imaginary and sense of self.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This imaginary locates Europeans as naturally at home in the North and inversely the populations of ‘developing’ countries as belonging geographically in the South.Footnote ¹⁰² The Southerner's movements towards and into Europe are thus understood as ‘disorderly’ and threatening Europe with the violence, chaos, and underdevelopment associated with the South.Footnote ¹⁰³ The framing of ‘crisis’, therefore, has served to justify the fortressing of Europe by (re)defining the latter as a space that is developed and civilised, and therefore cannot be home to people who are perceived as still in need of development and civilisation.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In this context, a European WPS discourse that fails to address forced displacement, or addresses it only in the realm of foreign policy, is harmful and must be resisted, on the grounds that it contributes to the fortressing of Europe in two ways. First, it solidifies Europe's sense of self as already at peace by obscuring the persisting gendered insecurity experienced by those who flee the zone of conflict with the hope of finding asylum in Europe. As noted earlier, European states not only fail to meet women and girls’ needs at Europe's borders, but often actively contribute to their insecurity by waging a war on immigration.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ European policymakers who fail to acknowledge this gap are more likely to fall into the trap of using the WPS framework to reinforce an idealised view of Europe's ‘own identity and sense of self’ as a gender-progressive community, while failing at making conflict-affected women a priority when policymakers feel it might harm ‘European interests’, as has been the case in the field of foreign policy.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Moreover, European actors may overlook lessons learned in non-European contexts of refugee protection that could be usefully applied in the handling of the refugee situation in Europe.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Second, the resulting preservation, in the shared European imaginary, of the heroic protector subjectivity ‘obscures the imbrication of such powerful actors in international capitalism and many of the political-economic asymmetries that produce displacement in the first place’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The failure to acknowledge Europe's share of responsibility for the ill fate of displaced women feeds variants of ‘femonationalism’: a tendency among some European feminists to cultivate the notion that ‘gender relations in the West are more advanced and must be taught to Muslim women’, or more generally women from the developing world.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Femonationalism cultivates unequal relationships in the international space. In the context of WPS, these beliefs often reinforce North/South hierarchies through the redeployment of colonial tropes of white protection of brown women from brown men first exposed by Gayatri Spivak.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In addition, the imagining of Europe as a distinctively safe and gender-progressive space paradoxically legitimises the fortressing of Europe against an outside imagined as unsafe and patriarchal, and thus fuels the war on immigration that maintains a growing number of women in a dangerous borderland.

Conclusion: The limits of inclusion and the road ahead

To summarise, we have shown that in nine European countries, WPS policy acknowledges the presence of conflict-affected women on the move at and within the borders of Europe. The emergence of the conflict-affected woman on the move to Europe in WPS policy and activism creates much needed entry points to better protect women forcibly displaced by conflict and, most innovatively, include them in decision-making processes. This emerging visibility of refugee women in WPS productively troubles the tendency of European states to self-present as always already reliably performing peaceful and gender-responsive protection and inclusion. This problematic tendency remains visible in the WPS policy of 13 European states and the EU, as they continue to omit the conflict-affected woman on the move from their WPS policy framework. This omission is enabled by the WPS framework itself, which demonstrably facilitates the reproduction of imperial hierarchies, the fortressing of Europe, and the neglect of refugee women's human security. In this context, WPS activists and policymakers who recognise the existence of women forcibly displaced by conflict near Europe or within its borders productively trouble the imagined but de facto murky border between a gender-progressive, peaceful Europe and a patriarchal, conflict-ridden outside.

This being said, we do not expect that the inclusion of refugee women within the WPS agenda would provide a panacea to the forms of insecurity they experience. Logics of inclusion meaningfully challenge, but also sometimes paradoxically reconsolidate, the fortressing and border-making effects of Europe's WPS policy, as can be observed in European states’ tendency to position themselves as heroic protectors of vulnerable refugee women. The terms of inclusion, in other words, matter as much as inclusion in the first place. To go back to Suaad Allami, whose words opened this article, the protection of displaced women should be as important as their inclusion in policymaking and in the identification of solutions addressing ‘the root causes of conflict and displacement’.Footnote ¹¹¹

We hope that evolving connections between forced displacement and WPS will remain the object of scholarly attention, and close by suggesting avenues of further research that we have not had space to explore. First, we focus in priority on the EEA as the area constitutive of fortress Europe. While such a classification has been necessary as a first step, we see potential in developing more carefully contextually informed accounts of how the silence around refugee questions is both maintained and challenged in different countries both within and beyond the EEA. Second, we have focused here on the figure of the conflict-affected woman. We are nonetheless wholly sympathetic to attempts to reorient the focus of the agenda from women to gender, thereby allowing consideration of the gendered experiences of men and boys, as well as sexual and gender minorities.Footnote ¹¹² We therefore identify possibilities for future research exploring in greater depth the intersections between gender, sexuality, race, and forms of insecurity experienced by refugees. Finally, our efforts to push the WPS community towards attention to refugee questions occur in the context of the emergent inclusion of a counter-terrorism mandate in the WPS agenda. The militarising potential of such developments is concerning, especially in view of a predominant, politically motivated, conflation of the figures of the asylum seeker and the international terrorist.Footnote ¹¹³ We therefore identify the need for continued vigilance for on what terms, and with what effects for the security and empowerment of women, refugee questions are taken up in the WPS agenda. It is crucial that these concerns are founded in a commitment to refugee women's right to asylum and political participation, rather than counterterrorism.