A comprehensive socio-legal study of the interrelation between gender and the law of refugee status. The book contains an interdisciplinary analysis. The empirical data, collected for this study, concerns Dutch asylum practice. The Netherlands is a prominent refugee-receiving country in Europe, yet hardly any English texts address Dutch refugee law. The book also covers foreign case law and academic writing. Therefore, the analysis is relevant for all refugee-receiving countries in the Western world; the empirical data on the Netherlands functions as a case study. The book combines perspectives of post-structuralist feminism and post-colonial studies. Refugee women are constructed as a double other. This intersectionality is related to the construction of the Third World as feminine (passive, in need of active outside intervention).

Questions of gender have strongly influenced the development of international refugee law over the last few decades. This volume assesses the progress toward appropriate recognition of gender-related persecution in refugee law. It documents the advances made following intense advocacy around the world in the 1990s, and evaluates the extent to which gender has been successfully integrated into refugee law. Evaluating the research and advocacy agendas for gender in refugee law ten years beyond the 2002 UNHCR Gender Guidelines, the book investigates the current status of gender in refugee law. It examines gender-related persecution claims of both women and men, including those based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and explores how the development of an anti-refugee agenda in many Western states exponentially increases vulnerability for refugees making gendered claims. The volume includes contributions from scholars and members of the advocacy community that allow the book to examine conceptual and doctrinal themes arising at the intersection of gender and refugee law, and specific case studies across major Western refugee-receiving nations. The book will be of great interest and value to researchers and students of asylum and immigration law, international politics, and gender studies.

Providing nuanced accounts of how the social identities of men and women, the context of displacement and the experience or manifestation of violence interact, this collection offers conceptual analyses and in-depth case studies to illustrate how gender relations are affected by displacement, encampment and return. The essays show how these factors lead to various forms of direct, indirect and structural violence. This ranges from discussions of norms reflected in policy documents and practise, the relationship between relief structures and living conditions in camps, to forced military recruitment and forced return, and covers countries in Africa, Asia and Europe.

At the turn of the new millenium, war, political oppression, desperate poverty, environmental degradation and disasters, and economic underdevelopment are sharply increasing the ranks of the world's twenty million forced migrants. In this volume, eighteen scholars provide a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary look beyond the statistics at the experiences of the women, men, girls, and boys who comprise this global flow, and at the highly gendered forces that frame and affect them. In theorizing gender and forced migration, these authors present a set of descriptively rich, gendered case studies drawn from around the world on topics ranging from international human rights, to the culture of aid, to the complex ways in which women and men envision displacement and resettlement.

Women filing gender-based asylum claims long faced skepticism and outright rejection within the United States immigration system. Despite erratic progress, the United States still fails to recognize gender as an established category for experiencing persecution. Gender exists in a sort of limbo segregated from other aspects of identity and experience. Sara L. McKinnon exposes racialized rhetorics of violence in politics and charts the development of gender as a category in American asylum law. Starting with the late 1980s, when gender-based requests first emerged in case law, McKinnon analyzes gender- and sexuality-related cases against the backdrop of national and transnational politics. Her focus falls on cases as diverse as Guatemalan and Salvadoran women sexually abused during the Dirty Wars and transgender asylum seekers from around the world fleeing brutally violent situations. She reviews the claims, evidence, testimony, and message strategies that unfolded in these legal arguments and decisions, and illuminates how legal decisions turned gender into a political construct vulnerable to American national and global interests. She also explores myriad related aspects of the process, including how subjects are racialized and the effects of that racialization, and the consequences of policies that position gender as a signifier for women via normative assumptions about sex and heterosexuality. Wide-ranging and rich with human detail, Gendered Asylum uses feminist, immigration, and legal studies to engage one of the hotly debated issues of our time.

This book addresses the ‘three moments’ in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) asylum seekers’ and refugees’ efforts to secure protection: The reasons for their flight, the Refugee Status Determination process, and their integration into the host community once they are recognized refugee status.The first part discusses one of the most under-researched areas within the literature devoted to asylum claims based on sexual orientation and gender identity, namely the reasons behind LGBTI persons’ flight. It investigates the motives that drive LGBTI persons to leave their countries of origin and seek sanctuary elsewhere, the actors of persecution, and the status quo of LGBTI rights. Accordingly, an intersectional approach is employed so as to offer a comprehensive picture of how a host of factors beyond sexual orientation/gender identity impact this crucial first stage of LGBTI asylum seekers’ journey.In turn, the second part explores the challenges that LGBTI asylum seekers face during the RSD process in countries of asylum. It first examines these countries’ interpretations and applications of the process in relation to the relevant UNHCR guidelines and questions the challenges including the dominance of Western conceptions and narratives of sexual identity in the asylum procedure, heterogeneous treatment concerning the definition of a particular social group, and the difficulties related to assessing one’s sexual orientation within the asylum procedure. It subsequently addresses the reasons for and potential solutions to these challenges.The last part of the book focuses on the integration of LGBTI refugees into the countries of asylum. It first seeks to identify and describe the protection gaps that LGBTI refugees are currently experiencing, before turning to the reasons and potential remedies for them.

This study provides a comprehensive account of the situation of women refugees globally and explains how they differ from men. It looks at causes of refugee flows, international laws and conventions and their application, the policies and legislation of Western governments, and lived experiences of the refugees themselves.