Refugee Women’s Participation in Turkey: Committees, Cooperatives and the WPS Agenda

The lack of participation of refugee women in decision-making processes both at the international and national levels disregards refugee women’s agency and poses significant challenges in addressing their unique needs and aspirations. In this research, our primary emphasis is exploring the potential for feminist engagement in supporting the inclusion of refugee women in decision-making processes within Turkey, home to the largest refugee population globally. We aim to advocate for a more comprehensive, inclusive, and efficacious response to the refugee crisis. Given the Turkish government's adversarial stance on gender-related matters, this study seeks to investigate opportunities for involving refugee women at the policy level. For this purpose, we examine refugee women’s committees and cooperatives as creative and emancipatory initiatives to promote refugee women’s participation. While committees function as platforms where refugee women gather periodically to discuss various challenges they face, cooperatives facilitate the participation of refugee women in the economic domain to support their socio-economic empowerment. This presentation explores the potential of these initiatives in promoting refugee women’s participation and maps out legal and political spaces to bring these platforms from the periphery to the centre. To this end, we examine the role of the United Nations Security Council's Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda in providing meaningful support to such initiatives. Although Turkey has yet to adopt a national action plan for the WPS Agenda, doing so could promote refugee women's involvement in decision-making processes. Additionally, refugee women's committees offer a fruitful space to discuss and introduce the WPS Agenda in Turkey. Therefore, we will integrate the practices of refugee women with feminist international policies to formulate improved responses to the refugee crisis in Turkey. Our research is grounded in primary qualitative data collected in several provinces in Turkey, where we conducted elite interviews with various stakeholders, including UN agencies, international and Turkish NGOs, and state institutions.