This four-year SNSF project, started in October 2022 and led by Elisabeth Prügl with Luisa Lupo and Raksha Gopal, is an ambitious and timely research endeavour. Based on on-the-ground research in India and Turkey, it aims to show that the survival practices of those at the margins can form the basis for developing new ways of organising economies and the interstate system. In this interview, the project team talks about its progress.
What would an international order look like that starts from the idea that people are mobile rather than settled?
Your project examines the gendered practices of survival among refugees and migrants. Why did you decide to study such a problem? And can you explain – with examples – the term “everyday practices of survival”?
Before answering your question, we must make it clear that given the practical difficulty of drawing the boundary between refugees and migrants and the fact that some populations are not recognised as refugees in their destination countries, we do not distinguish between these two legal categories in our project.
To come to your question, we understand survival not as a fact of life, but as a set of everyday practices performed by people living in difficult, often violent, situations. Surviving displacement, particularly, requires a lot of thought, decision-making and coming up with creative ways to provide for, secure and care for oneself and one’s family and community. Through a focus on survival, we aim to do a few things: empirically, we hope to stress the collaborative and transformative nature of survival in the context of increasing conflict-driven migrations to highlight that migrants and refugees are more than “bare lives”. We accomplish this by situating ourselves at the analytical level of the “everyday”. By this, we mean those daily, mundane and routine activities that are typically taken for granted and rarely analysed in international relations and political science. Examples of everyday practices of survival include feeding a family, securing shelter, providing care, educating children, and ensuring security and safety. For refugees and migrants, these practices are particularly challenging. This is because they face situations of physical, cultural and structural violence, not only in their origin countries but also within destinations. In destination countries, their presence might be viewed as a threat to national security, society or the economy, which translates into a failure to access basic needs, such as education, healthcare, employment, social insurance and protection. Survival practices are also gendered. They are distributed differently within families and communities, with women often shouldering greater domestic and care responsibilities than men. At the same time, the continued performance of these practices further reinforces this unequal gender division of labour.
The project is divided into three very ambitious stages. Can you describe them?
Our project consists of three modules, one is theoretical and two are based on field research in Turkey and India, respectively. We do not view them as stages organised hierarchically. Instead, we are developing our findings across modules and in conversation with each other, for a more complete understanding of survival practices, both in terms of theories and lived experiences.
The theory module is led by Lisa and its main objective is to advance feminist understandings of survival through the lens of social reproduction. The concept of social reproduction emerges from Marxist feminist thinking about the work required to produce “labour power”, the most valuable commodity of capitalism. In connecting the notions of survival and social reproduction, we hope to offer an understanding of the way capitalist, patriarchal and racist processes intertwine to become exploitative and violent, especially for those at the margins of the state system and the bottom of global supply chains. The idea is to seek a more extensive engagement between insights from political economy and security studies and in this way provide new tools for thinking about the gendered and racialised crises facing our world.
The module on Turkey is led by Luisa and examines survival practices among refugees and migrants, particularly Syrian refugees and migrant communities belonging to Kurdish, Arabic and other ethnic groups who live at the Turkey-Syria border. Many of them labour in the country’s cotton and apparel industries as informal workers; they are paid low wages and work long hours in unsafe and unhealthy environments with negative consequences for their well-being and personal lives.
The module on India, led by Raksha, focuses on the survival practices of refugees from Myanmar (also known as Burma) living in New Delhi and its vicinities. Like in the case of Turkey, they toil to secure basic needs by participating in various forms of informal labour. They face additional insecurities because of their stateless status, thus allowing us to explore survival in contexts of complete dispossession from land and citizenship.
What is the originality of your project?
This project is original in at least two ways. First, we bring together issues of feminist political economy and feminist security studies by analysing the everyday lives of people. The survival practices of refugees and migrants take place in conditions of violence caused by both wars and capitalism and these need to be taken into account more holistically.
Second, we examine survival “from the margins”. The idea of margins comes with social, conceptual, territorial, symbolic and moral connotations that inform our approach. By examining everyday practices, we pay attention to experiences often considered marginal in the sense that their societal relevance has been overlooked. By centring these activities, we seek to make them visible and valorise them. The margins also denote peripheral territorial locations, such as those where we locate our field research. Lastly, the margins symbolise the disadvantaged, precarious and vulnerable conditions in which refugees and migrants survive. While various forms of violence pose threats to their lives, by adopting a feminist lens, we focus on the ways in which they make life worth living for themselves and others. In doing so, we recognise care as an important part of the research process in relation to research participants who have been “marginalised”.
Your project is a real challenge that requires special sensitivity in its implementation. In terms of methodology, how do you go about it?
Refugees and migrants face significant vulnerabilities due to the circumstances that led to their migration from their countries of origin, their migration journey, their legal statuses in the destination country or personal characteristics such as gender, age and ethnicity. Cognisant of these vulnerabilities, we adopt particular ethical safeguards and practice an ethic of care toward participants, seeking to build real and trust-based relationships over several months in both field sites in India and Turkey.
In terms of methods, we use ethnographic participant observation and interviews with refugees and migrants to understand survival practices, as well as with other actors such as NGOs and human rights activists, who play an important role and/or are knowledgeable about their experiences. We apply the principle of “do no harm” by ensuring informed consent, confidentiality and anonymity, as well as actively take actions to protect the research participants. This involves taking precautions to avoid re-traumatisation, including research assistants with a refugee or migrant background, and bringing the research findings back to research participants. We adhere to the values of reflexivity, positionality and coproduction of knowledge, and seek to build knowledge starting from the lives of women. We also work with local partners to help us understand existing power relations and avoid pitfalls, and with activists to help foster transformative change.
What are your first findings – if you already have any?
Our initial findings reaffirm that in the wake of displacement, survival practices imply an unequal increase in care responsibilities, not just for women, but the entire displaced community. Lack of access to basic social and economic support in destination countries often forces refugees and migrants to find creative ways to survive and protect families and communities. For instance, they create informal financial networks to access loans; they shift between a variety of informal jobs; they broker relationships with local actors, such as state officials for food, security and protection from deportation; and they struggle to gain access to healthcare. While care can be physically and mentally exhausting, we also find that it is a means by which refugee and migrant women make sense of themselves and come to terms with their experiences of resettlement. For instance, several refugee mothers in India attach their identities to fighting for the rights of their children. However, survival practices can also be harmful and contradictory to acts of care. In Turkey, for instance, a vicious cycle of displacement and dispossession has forced minors into precarious employment within cotton fields (see the photo at the top of this interview).
You suggest that “survival practices of those at the margins can form the basis for developing new ways of organising economies and the interstate system”. What does this mean in terms of your contribution?
As issues of survival become increasingly urgent in a world characterised by exacerbating humanitarian and environmental crises, we aim to expose the various forms of violence that marginalised communities face due to the way nation-states and economic systems are currently organised. For example, what would it mean to prioritise issues of social reproduction and survival, rather than growth and profit, in the governance of economies and markets? What would an international order look like that starts from the idea that people are mobile rather than settled? By paying attention to how refugees and migrants respond to displacement, we want to give space to their experiences and think collaboratively about what a world would look like that brought them justice.
Can you say a word about the institutional aspects of the project – work plan, team and expected outputs?
The project will continue until September 2026 and will involve two workshops, one in India and one in Turkey. Among our outputs are two PhD dissertations (by Luisa and Raksha, both supervised by Lisa), academic articles and written material to stimulate debate among a wider audience.
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Interview by Marc Galvin, responsible for research valorisation, Research Office.
Banner image: Sweater of a school-aged girl accompanying her mother to the field during the 2022 cotton harvest, Şanlıurfa province, Turkey. Photo by Luisa Lupo.
