Gendering Security: The Impact of COVID-19 on Refugee Women in Turkey
In L. Sadiki & L. Saleh (Eds.), COVID-19 and risk society across the MENA region: Assessing governance, democracy, and inequality (pp. 195–214). I.B. Tauris, Bloomsbury Publishing.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created “a double emergency” for refugees in obtaining sanitary assistance and health security on the one hand and accessing basic economic, social, educational, and political resources on the other. Gender, bringing an additional risk factor to socioeconomic class, has been an important factor affecting the way refugees experience the effects of COVID-19. Women and girls have been at particular risk experiencing increased gender-based vulnerabilities. They are likely to experience the following issues: domestic violence, forced or early marriages, dropping out of the formal education system, no opportunity for online education, unemployment, and inaccessible healthcare facilitates. Due to the intersectional nature of risks and vulnerabilities posed to women in general and women in disadvantaged groups in particular, we adopt a broader definition of security to analyze the refugee women in Turkey.
In this chapter, we will apply a gender-based analysis to study the notions of security and insecurity within the context of COVID-19 through the case study of refugee women in Turkey. We will examine the inequalities in the intersection of being both refugees and women while facing the pandemic. These inequalities are not created by the COVID-19, but they have been exacerbated by it. Turkey hosts 3.7 million Syrians, the highest number globally, with “temporary protection” status. Our analysis of gendering security is divided into two parts. Part one contains a theoretical discussion of feminist IR theory. IR feminists critically reexamine the concept of security, defining it in “multidimensional and multilevel terms.” They broaden the notion of security to incorporate bottom-up factors instead of top-down. Security threats involve “domestic violence, rape, poverty, gender subordination, and ecological destruction, as well as war.” Feminist IR Theory also emphasizes the interdependence of states as well as “human connectedness, dialogue, and cooperation” in insecurities and risks. The second part will evaluate the experiences of refugee women in Turkey with an emphasis on intersectionalities of the vulnerabilities experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. We will argue that when forced migration, global pandemic and gender intersects, women are likely to experience “double or even triple burden” indicating greater insecurities within the spheres of health, family, work, and education.