Displacing Equality? Women's Participation and Humanitarian Aid Effectiveness in Refugee Camps

Abstract

This is the accepted version of a paper published in Refugee Survey Quarterly. This paper has been peer-reviewed but does not include the final publisher proof-corrections or journal pagination.

Refugee men as perpetrators, allies or troublemakers? Emerging discourses on men and masculinities in humanitarian aid

“…This is especially prominent in the representation of men as emasculated troublemakers, where efforts to empower women are described as victimizing men. This conception of gender leads to an uncritical approach of identifying existing gender differences and using them as point of departure for the design of aid programs; an approach that can and often does exacerbate existing inequalities in refugee situations (Olivius 2014). Further, the strong emphasis on recruiting men as allies in gender equality promotion reinforces the tendency to de-politicize gender and obscures the power relations at issue.…”

“…This situation is further aggravated by humanitarian aid organizations' programs that focus on women. Humanitarian organizations' preference for including women in aid programs is partly due to perceptions of women as less corrupt, more reliable and more family-oriented, thereby constituting more useful partners in the delivery of aid than men (Olivius 2014). This perception is visible in the 2009 WFP gender policy.…”

Built on shaky ground: Reflections on Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy

“…Speaking to the context of humanitarian and development responses in refugee settings, Elisabeth Olivius argues that a major shortcoming in the practical application of gender and gender equality principles in current development practice is that the term gender is used to mean "being attuned to differences between women and men and seeking to take them into account to design effective aid programmes." 30 She argues that this effectively sidesteps the feminist, political goals of gender equality that would see policies and interventions engaged with structural inequality and disadvantage. Taking this criticism further, Andrea Cornwall has lamented that the term gender in and of itself has been sanitized, that "its political and analytical bite has been blunted not only by the lack of specificity in its use, but also by the process of its domestication by development agencies."…”

Remapping the Holy Land from the margins: how a Jordanian Evangelical church juggles the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ in the Syrian refugee response

“…Rather, it reflects wider trends in the development sector that paint them as ideal aid beneficiaries (e.g. Malkki 2015, Olivius 2014). As critics have pointed out, depoliticized representations that focus on suffering and lack of agency obscure the root causes of displacement.…”