The Complex Ties that Bind: Gendered Agency and Expectations in Conflict and Climate Change‐related Migration
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Author | Henri Myrttinen |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12402 |
The Complex Ties that Bind: Gendered Agency
and Expectations in Conflict and Climate
Change-related Migration
Henri Myrttinen
International Alert, London
Abstract
For the past decade, western public discourse and the policy world have become increasingly concerned about ‘irregular’
migration and, to a slightly lesser extent perhaps, what driving role conflict and climate change play in triggering it. Address-
ing the causes and effects requires having a better understanding of the impacts that climate change has on multi-dimen-
sional crises and the knock-on effect this has on migration. A key factor in understanding how these processes affect different
women, girls, men, boys and other gender identities is gender. Much of the analysis, however, has tended to be based on rel-
atively simplistic teleological models and gender stereotypes. Based on case studies, this article argues for more nuanced
understandings of how gender and other societal markers affect people differently in different contexts of crisis and climate
change-related migration to better formulate policy responses.
Dots not connected: gender –crisis –
displacement
‘Irregular migration’and, to a slightly lesser extent, ‘climate
change’have been key buzz words in Western policy circles
over the past few years, at times mixed in with fears of vio-
lent extremism. Although the issues are not new, they have
gained increasing prominence in the public discourse. This
has been especially true after the sudden increase in refu-
gees arriving in Europe in 2015, concerns in the United
States of America about undocumented migrants arriving
from Latin America and Australia’s on-going moral panic sur-
rounding the arrival of undocumented refugees by boat.
While climate change, violent conflict, and migration may
often be linked, the links are not simple and straight-for-
ward. Nonetheless, the links are often presented in simplistic
terms in public and media discourse: climate change leads
to conflict, conflict leads to extremism, and this leads to
migration. Increased in-migration, or even the mere spectre
of it, has in turn been repeatedly linked by populist media
and politicians to the threat of terrorism and violent extrem-
ism. An example of this was the public debate around the
role of climate change as a potential causal factor for the
civil war in Syria, and thereby its contribution to violent
extremism and ‘irregular’migration. In the debate, nuance
and complexity were often replaced by one-dimensional
models of causation.
Gender is a salient but complex category in determining
how people are affected by and react to crisis and displace-
ment. Nonetheless, in public and media discourses, gender
roles are also mostly cast in simplistic terms: women are
seen as a homogenous category of ‘the most vulnerable’
victims; migrant women as oppressed victims without
agency; migrant men as aggressive, sexually predatory, and
paradoxically as simultaneously lazy and as a threat to jobs.
These simplistic representations tend to disregard the com-
plex ways in which gender, crisis and displacement interact
and are not restricted to media and public discourse alone.
Peacebuilding and development policy as well as practice
also often simplistically equate gender with women only,
and women are often cast as a homogenous, undifferenti-
ated and essentialist category, such as of passive victims or
innate peacemakers (Fr€
ohlich and Gioli, 2015; Myrttinen
et al., 2014). What is thereby missed is an examination of
how our gendered roles and our responses to crises are, to
a degree, conditioned by societal expectations placed upon
us and internalised by us, differing not only based on gen-
der but also based on other societal identity markers such
as age, location, dis-/ability, class, sexual orientation or
ethno-religious background.
In spite of the inter-connectedness of crisis, displacement,
migration and gender, policy and media narratives, and also
research mostly do not ‘connect the dots’between these
phenomena. There is thus little in the way of comparative
literature or of theoretical frameworks to draw upon
(Fr€
ohlich and Gioli, 2015; Myrttinen, 2016). This contribution
adds to this emerging body of literature, making the case
for using a comprehensive, intersectional and contextualised
gender lens in order to better understand the inter-related
phenomena of conflict, climate change and migration. I will
highlight some of the complexities which are often over-
looked in mainstream narratives and how these bind people
to certain choices in dealing with crisis and displacement –
but also tie them to others. I will first set the scene by
©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2017) 8:1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12402
Global Policy Volume 8 . Supplement 1 . February 2017
48
Special Issue Article
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