It is February 11th 2011. After almost 30 years of dictatorship, and 18 days of mass protest, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has been forced to resign. I am in the shared PhD office with my peers, many of whom are Egyptian. As they rejoice, they come up to me and say “Sophie, this is great news, Syria will be next!”. I am elated for them, nodding while wearing a hopeful yet sceptical smile, then replying: “I hope so, Inshallah – God Willing”. Born to a Syrian father and British mother, and with deep connections to the country, I know Syria’s case will be very different. Not only because of the horrific dictatorship there, but because of Syria’s strategic political connections with Russia. Amonth later, on March 15th, The Arab Spring did indeed reach Syria. Millions of men, women and children of all faiths peacefully marched hand-in-hand demanding their basic human rights. The regime answered their demands with empty promises followed by the most horrific violence. Today, 12 years later, the Syrian refugee crisis remains the world’s largest displacement crisis of our time, with one in two Syrians either dead, displaced or detained under the pervasive regime. A GENDERED APPROACH In a country where there is no freedom of speech or a free press, I was hooked on what some brave Syrians were posting on social media, what was shared in Western media and written in humanitarian reports. Whilst academic research has proactively analysed the geopolitical and economic implications of the war, little attention has focused on the gendered implications. There are currently more than five million (registered) Syrian refugees who have fled to neighbouring countries (Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq); 51%of whom are women. One in four of these women are sole providers for their families. They struggle to afford food and shelter for their children, leaving many with no choice but to force their daughters into childmarriage. In countries where work permits are almost impossible to attain for Syrian refugees (especially women) and UNHCR funding is dwindling (slashed under Trump administration in 2018), micro home-based entrepreneurship has become the only means of gaining a livelihood. Indeed, it has been reported that some women responded to these extremely harsh conditions by setting up home-basedmicro enterprises founded on traditional and typically feminised indigenous skills, such as cooking, tailoring and craftwork. I was fascinated by this, especially as I learned that many of these women had not worked back home in Syria. I began my study with Syrian women refugee-entrepreneurs in Jordan in 2015. My research over the last seven years with these formidable women has not only contributed to our limited knowledge about women’s entrepreneurship as a means of economic survival and cultural revival during extreme adversity, it also questions the viability of our “Western” understanding of the identity of the ‘the entrepreneur’ – (sub)consciously portrayed as the white, western, ‘heroic-male’ – when conducting research in non-Western contexts. ENTREPRENEURSHIP FOR SURVIVAL In Jordan, four out of five Syrian refugees live under the national poverty line, surviving on about US$3 a day. Amajority of the men in my study were husbands and fathers forced into precarious and illegal work (i.e. working without a work permit). My time in the field made me realise that despite Syria’s adherence to traditional patriarchal gender roles, there was a clear shift in this mentality, as women in these families did not believe the economic burden should fall solely on their husbands. Indeed, economic survival was now ‘a family problem’, not just the ‘father’s problem’ to resolve. Although the women were completely detached from their social networks, they set up home-based enterprises and were able to slowly curate new ties through their children’s schools, their neighbours, local charities, and even anonymously on social media. To increase the businesses’ survival chances, they ran themas a ‘family business’ where eachmember took on a task. Entrepreneurship by nomeans is the answer to poverty, nor the route to women’s ‘self-reliance’, ‘self-fulfilment’ and ‘self-empowerment’ as we are led to believe in theWestern world. It is simply their onlymethod of gaining an income to survivemonth tomonth – and it continues to be an unsustainable one. NEVER-ENDING LIMBO Whilst living in constant economic precarity, not knowing whether they will be able to pay the rent or feed their 28 |
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