Feminist scholarship has demonstrated that, in the Middle East and elsewhere, ‘womenandchildren’ become the central and uncontroversial objects of humanitarian care and control in contexts of conflict, disaster, and displacement. Yet very little scholarly work has attempted to understand the place of men and masculinities within humanitarian work in the Middle East. Through an analysis of the Syria refugee response in Jordan, this paper investigates how humanitarian workers relate to Syrian refugee men, how they understand refugee masculinities within Syrian communities, and how they conceptualize their responsibilities towards a demographic not typically thought of as ‘vulnerable.’ It argues that Syrian refugee men are read by humanitarian actors in gendered and racialized ways as agential, political, independent, and at times threatening, and that Syrian men are thereby understood to disrupt humanitarian understandings of refugees as passive, feminized objects of care. These understandings of refugee men as somehow outside of humanitarianism’s ‘beneficiaries’ can be traced to humanitarian understandings of what ‘gender work’ involves; the ways in which gender has been mobilized as a grounds for intervention in the societies of the Middle East; and how Syrian men disrupt the ostensible binary, on which humanitarianism relies, between the ‘political’ and the ‘non-political.’ Humanitarian actors’ insistence that their work relies on ‘objective,’ ‘global’ standards simultaneously sidelines refugee men within important aspects of the refugee response, and is used to justify and legitimate the control humanitarians exercise over refugee women. In putting forward these arguments, the paper contributes to the growing debates on men and masculinities in the Middle East and the emerging literature on the Syria refugee response, and offers a distinct contribution to them both by analyzing humanitarian understandings of Syrian refugee masculinities. This paper is grounded in feminist and postcolonial scholarship on gender and interventions in the Middle East, as well as critical scholarship on humanitarianism. It draws on primary fieldwork in Jordan, which was undertaken over 12 months in 2015 and 2016. During this time, the author conducted extensive participant-observation with non-governmental organizations in Za‘tari Refugee Camp, the largest camp for Syrians in the Middle East, and conducted over 60 interviews with Syrian refugees and humanitarian workers, in both camp and non-camp settings.

The Syrian refugee crisis is the largest refugee and displacement crisis of our time. Since the official beginning of the Syrian war in 2011, more than 5.6 million people have fled the country as refugees, and another 6.2 million people are currently displaced within Syria. Whereas the Syrian refugee crisis has received significant academic and media attention over the past few years, limited research addresses the role of gender and sexuality in shaping responses to the displacement and resettlement of Syrian refugees. Beyond the accounts of women as victims of gender-based violence lie a complex set of factors shaping the experiences and choices Syrian refugee women make in both fleeing Syria and resettling to places such as Canada. Combining focused ethnographic interviews with media discourse analysis, this joint paper offers an intersectional analysis of how gendered violence and public discourses around Syrian refugees constructs contradictory narratives about Syrian refugee women. Drawing on interviews conducted with Syrian women who arrived in Montreal, Canada as refugees since 2015 in conjunction with a comparative discourse analysis of international news articles from Al Jazeera, BBC News, and the New York Times that deal with the Syrian crisis from a gendered lens, this paper will highlight how systemic racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy intersect and shape the lives of refugee women. Using a mixed-methods approach and analysis by combining ethnographic work with media discourse analysis, our project offers a contrapuntal examination of how normative concepts of masculinity, femininity, sexuality, family, and subjectivity inflect accounts of refugee displacement and resettlement to offer new insights into how gender is deployed in responses to the current refugee crisis.

The high rate migration of rural population, from villages to cities after the Iran-Iraq War, created a new fast-growing social stratum that resided in the outskirts of big cities, especially Tehran. This population that escaped unemployment and poverty in the hope of jobs is still amongst the most marginalized and disenfranchised, constituting twenty-five percent of today’s Iran population. Rapid demographical changes unsettled the fabric of traditional communities and demanded new identities and communities. Collective mourning rituals became a space that allowed the emergence of new identities and communities amongst the multi-ethnic growing population of rural migrants. The end of the reform era and the election of president Ahmadinejad in 2005 marks the start of a state-sponsored cultural campaign for the institutionalization of the mourning rituals. In the past decade, mourning rituals have become an important part of people’s social life. Based on a 2018 report, there are 91,618 hey’at in the country of that 59,000 are active, with tens of thousands active member, making up “the largest cultural and advertisement network in Shi'a world.” The new phase of mourning rituals has been created and carried on by three main factors: establishment of Debel Organization, a non-profit to organize and support the rituals singers, poets, and writers; the rise of Arazi and his mourning band; and the reemergence and popularization of millenarianism, the doctrine of Intizar, awaiting the return of the occulted Shi'a Imam, Mahdi. By analyzing the political history, performative features, and literary content of Arazi’s newly emerged style in mourning and utilizing Western queer theories, building on the ground-work of scholars of sexuality in the Middle East, this study investigates the work of class, gender, and sexuality in Shi'a collective rituals and the formation of new social bonds. Moreover, the study shows how the rituals have created a space and a direct communication medium through which the ruling structure organize, supervise, and manage its citizens closely.

Feminist studies of international relations and conflict have illustrated the gendered effects of war (Elshtain, 1995; MacKenzie, 2012; Sylvester, 2010, 2013). Studies of conflict in the Middle East have also shown how the legacies of war transform women’s rights struggles (Khoury, 2013; Saeidi, 2010). However, the following question remains unexplored by current studies: As women challenge social and political structures in the post-war context, how do they develop the strength to undermine the norms that govern their societies? We argue that between oppression and resistance, and before activism, there exists strategies for cultivating the necessary self-confidence and courage to confront the contingent histories with which a woman lives. What role do wars play, if any, in the empowerment of women during this process? In this paper we examine these questions by exploring the Persian memoirs of Iranian women who have lost their husbands in the Syrian conflict. We also draw on interviews with pro-regime female youth that consume these memoirs and apply them to their lives. We argue that maintaining imaginary relationships with martyred men is one way that some women in Iran are gathering the will to push back on the limits that govern their lives. In the current context of gender struggles, some women in Iran and the broader Middle East have decided to be strong in the face of socio-political conflicts that are more detrimental if overlooked. In this paper we seek to understand how loving martyred men helps some Iranian women remain resilient.

Women of the PKK have been at the centre and forefront of the fight against the Islamic State and other (non-) state actors in the Middle East; both in the armed resistance and the political and activist spheres. The women’s fight for space can be observed not only in Rojava (Northern Syria), where the party has made tremendous gains, but everywhere where the PKK and its sister parties hold power; in Bakur (Eastern Turkey) prior to the ongoing state backlash, Ba?ur (Iraqi Kurdistan) and to a lesser extent in Rojhelat (Western Iran). The centring of gender-based equality and justice is also an important feature of the PKK’s revolutionary ideology; the slogan ‘if women are not free, society cannot be free’, is often repeated by activists of the movement. This paper examines how women got to play such central roles in the PKK and zooms into the process of ‘becoming’ a female freedom fighter and asks how the party’s liberation ideology is taught, learned and implemented. Based on ethnographic data collected in training camps of the female fighters in Iraq, Syria and Turkey (2015-2016), this paper explores how the women of the movement learn 'irade' (the will to resist), what kind of agency this provides them with, but also how this concept helps the movement to control its subjects. It introduces ‘militant femininity’; a conceptual lens to critically analyse the ways in which women learn to become steadfast fighters that are willing to sacrifice themselves in life and death to the leader Öcalan, the PKK and its vision of a free Kurdistan. I argue that the case of the Kurdish Women’s Movement allows us to complicate ongoing discussions on gender and war, as well as feminism, nationalism and militarism because the women really do hold immense power within the different party structures. However, the project of 'Democratic Confederalism', the political project currently being implanted in Rojava by the PKK, remains deeply gendered with the ‘free women’ being an important but strictly policed and essentialised marker of the aspired ‘non-state nation’.