Palestine in Focus - Palestinian Refugee Women from Syria to Jordan
In our ninth Palestine in Focus, Afaf Jabiri will talk about her latest book Palestinian Refugee Women from Syria to Jordan. Decolonizing the Geopolitics of Displacement.
Jabiri reveals the extraordinary layers of discrimination suffered by Palestinian women from Syria displaced to Jordan, based on four years of field research in Palestinian camps in Jordan - including unique interviews with Palestinian refugee women, aid workers, and representatives of international organisations and NGOs. The women's experiences show them caught between settler colonialism, militarism, nationalism, refugees' global governance and gender regimes that subjected them to multiple forms of structural gender-based violence. Jabiri argues for a feminist analysis of settler colonialism's epistemic violence of anti-Palestinianism to expose the history and geopolitics of intersecting oppressive systems that work through and upon gendered bodies of Palestinian refugee women in humanitarian settings. The book also highlights how local women's groups and frontline workers attempt to fill service gaps. Using a rich theoretical lens to understand the experiences of women in refugee camps, this book attempts to decolonise issues around migration, displacement, refugees and women.
Previous work on the Syrian refugee crisis has overlooked the very particular experiences of Palestinian refugee women, which has weakened feminist analysis of gendered processes of humanitarianism, and feminist transnational and intersectional solidarity. Her book offers a vital critique of how feminists' adoption of a universality-based analysis of the Syrian refugee crisis has contributed to the further marginalisation of Palestinian refugee women from Syria.
Practical
Date: 15 September 2025
Time: 16:00
Place: IISG, Cruquiusweg 31, Amsterdam
Entrance: Free admission, but please send an email to event@iisg.nl if you want to join.
Dr. Afaf Jabiri is a Palestinian refugee, feminist scholar, and activist whose work bridges academic research with grassroots activism. She is a Senior Lecturer in Global Development at the University of East London, where she also serves as Co-Director of the Centre for Social Justice and Change and leads MA programmes in Refugee Studies and Conflict, Displacement and Human Security. With a background spanning 17 years in gender equality and humanitarian work across the Arab region, Afaf Jabiri brings a deeply interdisciplinary lens to her work that draws on sociology, history, international law, and feminist theory. Her research focuses on intersectionality, settler colonialism, and women's agency, especially within Palestinian refugee contexts in Jordan, Egypt, and Yemen. Her work challenges dominant narratives and advances justice for displaced and marginalised communities.
