Marriage for Refuge? Syrian Refugee Womens Resettlement Experiences in Egypt

Women navigating forced displacement are often confronted by gendered norms and expectations. The practices that they initiate in response remain under-explored. For Syrian women who settled in Egypt during the 'Syrian refugee crisis,' one such practice is marriage to Egyptian men. Many such marriages have been unregistered or polygamous and have been criticized by some feminist advocacy groups and media platforms as exploitative. By focusing on this case study, I aim to transcend interpretations that situate such marriages within the domains of sexual and gender-based violence and child and forced marriage. I instead ask: How might marriage be a strategy for resettlement? And how might it further our understanding of refugee womens decisions, experiences, and subjectivities? In the summer of 2017, I conducted forty in-depth interviews in two major Egyptian cities, Cairo and Alexandria, with Muslim Syrian refugee women, their husbands and family members who took part in these marriage arrangements, a practice which I refer to as 'marriage for refuge.' Using a decolonizing intersectional theoretical framework, I argue that by seeking marriage, these women are not simply complying with socially ascribed gender roles. Instead, they are making a calculated decision to forge their own resettlement trajectories. I found that, despite elements of victimization stemming from displacement and patriarchy, intersectional factors including gender, ethnicity, and displacement were resources that some respondents leveraged to enhance their autonomy and to challenge norms. The narratives underscore how displacement and marriage are connected, in that exile has led to the reconstruction of the meaning and purpose of marriage. In turn, marriage has come to be perceived as a means to overcome the precarity of displacement. To explain this, I attend to social conceptions such as sanad (social capital or support) and sutra (protection or sheltering) and social practices such as polygamy and customary marriage. I position marriage for refuge as a phenomenon that expands understandings of intersectional, gendered and Othered refugee experiences. In so doing, I highlight two decolonizing analytical strategies: rejecting binaries (e.g., agent/victim) and decoupling associations (e.g., agency=resistance), and draw attention to concepts such as moral agency, creative leveraging, and social capital.