What can feminist economics tell us about gender-based violence and migration?

Guest post by Dr. Lara-Zuzan Golesorkhi. Lara-Zuzan is affiliated with the University of Portland, and the Centre for Migration, Gender and Justice. This post is part of a thematic series in occasion of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gendered Violence. 

Gender-based violence (GBV) is often a cause for migration. Women and girls leave their countries of origin to escape GBV and other related harmful practices. GBV, however, also occurs along migratory routes and in destination countries where protection gaps in GBV prevention, mitigation, and response persist. These protection gaps are particularly pronounced in border areas, including transit points, crossings, and temporary shelters where GBV manifests in varied ways.

In this blog, I draw attention to factors that inform these protection gaps, such as tensions between operational structures and funding structures, by outlining what feminist economics can tell us about GBV and migration. The importance of feminist economics in this context emerges when considering border areas as high-risk GBV spaces given the power relations at play relative to border control and state sovereignty. 

Canning, for instance, holds that as scholarship on gender and migration evolves, “structures of coercive control set forth by the state” that inflict harm on women must be studied more carefully (p. 259). On this account, gendered border harms are perpetuated by punitive measures of the state that “corrode women’s autonomy and indeed sense of safety” through facilitation of violence rather than protection thereof. Relatedly, the work of Gerard and Pickering shows that “structural contradictions” between protection obligations and border control exacerbate violence experienced by women in transit. In this regard, Torres and others further find that the act of waiting in border areas operates both “as a disciplinary and state practice and as an outcome of exclusion and state withdrawal,” thus rendering waiting not simply as a passive process because migrants are actively subjected to power relations vis-à-vis governance frameworks such as Regional Refugee Response Plans (RRPs). RRPs involve multi-partner and multi-sectoral cross-border strategies and rest on complex funding structures that connect humanitarianism with migration governance .

It is here where feminist economics, as a field, comes in and can shed light on GBV and migration. Based on my recent research on operational and funding structures in response plans for Venezuela and Ukraine, I propose that there are five ways that feminist economics offers valuable insights into GBV prevention, mitigation, and response in migration .

One, feminist economics perspectives speak to three fundamental themes when exploring the intersections of migration and gender: globalization, national economic development, and governance. Of particular importance to high-risk GBV spaces, notably border areas, is the theme of governance at the nexus of humanitarianism and migration. At this nexus, the ways in which states yield power, and with that money, in responding to migratory movements and humanitarian crisis can be characterized by varied levels of incoherence and flexibility. By way of example, in the response plan for Venezuela, GBV prevention, mitigation, and response reached around 2% of the required funding in 2021 and around 18% in 2022. While both numbers are alarming in terms of the pervasiveness of underfunding in addressing GBV, they demonstrate the incoherence and flexibility that prevails at the hands of states.

Two, feminist economics perspectives place gender as a fundamental category in inquiries about economic-political power relations. This points to the urgency of study around the underexplored linkage between economic relations, GBV, and migration in which gender considerations define dollar amounts spent. This is evident in the funding structures in the RRP-Ukraine given the absence of any funding streams being explicitly allocated to GBV as a Protection sub-sector in 2022; instead, GBV funding was either channelled through the Child Protection sub-sector or the cross-sectoral infrastructure of Prevention of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. This again connects to the perpetual underfunding of GBV prevention, mitigation, and response globally, amounting to less than 1% per year.

Third, feminist economics perspectives focus on situated knowledges, highlighting the linkage between economic-political power relations and border criminologies as border areas pose hard-to-reach spaces for GBV resource and service delivery. Indeed, in both the response plans for Venezuela and Ukraine, the need for outreach and localized approaches have been stressed. Yet, only few rigorous studies on GBV operational and funding structures in migration-humanitarian settings exist. In their scoping review of GBV coordination in said settings, Raftery and others observe that GBV is consistently de-prioritized in operational structures and that funding structures continue to provide short-term, inflexible funding and don’t adequately involve local actors in their programming. On this account, a connection must also be drawn to monitoring and evaluation aspects. As Lokot finds, the primary attention on ‘beneficiary count’ rather than ‘beneficiary impact’ is misguided and reinforces power dynamics in an already highly hierarchized context. 

This is further reflected in the discrepancies between people in need, people targeted, and people reached through RRPs and thus processes that underpin risks of GBV which presents a fourth point of what feminist economics can tell us about GBV and migration. For example, in 2022, in regards to Ukraine, 3.7 million people were identified as in need of GBV-related programming, but only half of them were targeted, and around five percent were ultimately reached through the Response Plan. In the same year, in regards to Venezuela, out of the 1.82 million people identified in need, only around a quarter of them were targeted through the Response Plan and in actuality reaching only four percent. Again, while these numbers provide a daunting picture on resource and service delivery, it is the ‘why’, namely the underlying mechanisms such as the tensions between operational structures and funding structures in RRPs, that feminist economics help reveal.

Finally, it is the understanding of feminist economics as political practice and the corresponding epistemological basis that presents a methodological approach beyond disciplinary bounds. As an interdisciplinary scholar of political science, migration studies, and gender studies, and as a migrant woman myself, I intentionally decided to employ a feminist economics framing into the study of RRPs and GBV as I reckoned with the absence of literature that brings “the money and the politics” together. What this ‘excursion’ into a new theoretical framing taught me is outlined in the above points and shows how combining fields of inquiry such as feminist economics and border criminologies allows us to better interrogate and understand these connections and how to address them.

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