Renegotiating gender roles and relationships in displacement: syrian families in Lebanon and Germany

This thesis investigates the impact of displacement on gender roles and relationships among Syrian refugee families in Lebanon and Germany. It is based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2017 and 2019. The research questions that have guided this study are: What kind of gender role and relationship transformations do Syrian families experience in Lebanon and Germany? How do Syrian men and women renegotiate relationships in displacement? Can different displacement situations generate similar experiences? I argue that due to the specific legal and bureaucratic conditions put in place by Lebanon and Germany, Syrian families experienced a protracted-temporary displacement. I conceptualize this space as liminality, a non-structural context that allows for alternative dimensions of agency to take place. For each case study, I identify four typologies of transformations in gender roles and relationships and how Syrian men and women renegotiated them in refugeehood. In its final discussion, this thesis compares the two displacement situations and suggests that three dimensions of agency can be uncovered in this liminal space – an iterative dimension, where agency is positioned towards the past; a projective dimension, which orientates agency towards the future; and a practical evaluative dimension, in which situational judgments are contextualized within concrete circumstances. This thesis offers three main contributions to knowledge: a theoretical one, by using agency as a lens to analyze gender relations in forced migration; a methodological one with its relational perspective that explores interconnected sets of relationships; and an empirical one, based on the comparison of two displacement situations – one in the Global North and one in the Global South. In this sense, this work aims to understand forced migration experiences as interconnected phenomena, and relationships as dynamically evolving in the space of displacement.