Vulnerabilities in displacement: Can humanitarianism protect women?

Abstract This article develops a conceptual and normative framework for addressing the question of the protection of female forced migrants. While the place of gender in international systems of protection has been a matter of discussion for the past thirty years and feminist (and other) scholars of forced migration have drawn attention to the problems and limitations of humanitarian protection of women, this discussion has lacked a philosophical framework within which to discriminate adequately between gender-blind, gender-sensitive, and gender-transformative approaches to the protection of women, to analyse the significance of the relationships between different stages of displacement for protection, and to specify the salience of different dimensions of autonomy for the gendering of protection. This is the task that this article takes up. We draw on both original fieldwork and on secondary materials to illustrate our theoretical claims, but the purpose of this argument is not to provide additional empirical data on this topic, rather it is to offer a framework within which to understand the normative significance of these data and to outline principles to guide institutional responses to it, and adapted to local realities.