Syrian brides and the Global Compact on Refugees: How Canada’s FIAP can reimagine refugee women’s empowerment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The current Liberal government has publicly endorsed a feminist agenda which has led to initiatives such as Canada’s feminist international assistance policy (FIAP), initiated in 2017. At the same time, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada Report (TRC) of 2015 reiterates how the histories of colonialism are still persistent and need to be addressed in our curriculum, research, and policy. This essay argues that a fully feminist agenda must be anti-colonial in nature, rejecting Eurocentric, stereotypical and universalizing explanations and leaving space for cultural interpretations, local solutions and listening to the voices of marginalized groups as experts. In short, FIAP and the TRC must be brought together in practical and policy-orientated ways to promote women’s empowerment and gender equity through a decolonizing framework. In support of Canada’s leading role in the advancement of refugee issues and the implementation of the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR), and informed by its feminist approach to foreign policy and FIAP which “comes with “aggressive” funding targets for gender equality and women’s empowerment” (CCIC, 2017), it is important to scrutinize the notion of gender empowerment and related notions, such as forced marriage and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). Drawing on doctoral fieldwork conducted in Egypt summer of 2017, this paper uses the case of Syrian refugee women who marry ‘for refuge’ to explore how certain groups of refugee women and their stories challenge international humanitarian perceptions that often stigmatize similar arrangements as exploitation, sex trafficking and/or forced marriages. I use what I refer to as marriage for refuge and marriage immobility to demonstrate how humanitarian notions such as empowerment and related notions such as SGBV and forced marriage can be reimagined. The study aims to offer insights for a gender-responsive refugee policy that is feminist, decolonizing and sensitive to culture, context and diversity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".