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This seminar will report on Dr Heba Batainah’s recent field work in Jordan, Lebanon and Australia. The field work involved interviewing over 80 Syrian refugee women living in and out of official refugee camps and 30 individuals working with Non-government Organisations (NGOs) and Community Based Organisations (CBOs). The fieldwork is part of a larger project funded by the Australian Civil-Military Centre with Dr de Percy and Professor Peter Leahy into the United Nations’ Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda and its impact on Syrian refugee women.

From our research conducted to date with Syrian refugee women and drawing on the experiences of the NGOs and policy experts, there is a distinct lack of theorisation of the nature of forced migration and resettlement beyond humanitarian ‘triage’ efforts in the short term. As the conflict in Syria enters its ninth year, humanitarian triage efforts have largely run their course, with many refugees continuing to live in host countries under a variety of circumstances, some returning to Syria and a small percentage having been resettled in refugee receiving countries. As the conflict continues and as refugee numbers in host countries remain high, the policy aims of the host and receiving countries will continue to direct the lives of Syrian refugee women located outside of Syria.

Dr Batainah will share some of the early findings from her field work while also discussing some of the challenges of conducting fieldwork in political sensitive environments. The seminar will also include the showing of two very short documentaries to add visual depth to the information shared in the seminar.