A feminist geopolitics of living: Syrians’ struggles to maintain and reunite intimate ties across borders

Abstract

In this article, I examine the protracted separation of Syrian families. As the number of people seeking asylum in Europe spiked during the summer of 2014, Denmark introduced a new refugee protection status to the Danish Aliens Act, known as §7.3: A General Temporary Protection Status (GTPS). This status enables recipients to legally reside in Denmark. Yet, it crucially permits the Danish state to suspend recipients’ right to family reunification for a three-year period, creating a condition of protracted separation. While feminist scholars have called attention to how intimate ties are being deliberately targeted by western states, I argue that there remains much to be said about how people actively negotiate these forms of bordering, sustain kinship, and build futures. To this end, I examine Syrians’ lived experiences of forced separation and their efforts to maintain intimate ties across time and space. Building on feminist and postcolonial scholars’ attention to life-making practices, I develop the analytic of a feminist geopolitics of living. This article offers two crucial insights. First, it makes visible the intimate and often hidden ways that the violence of protracted separation is materialized through kinship ties. Second, it illuminates the central roles of kinship ties within the struggles against violent bordering regimes. I argue that this analytic helps to understand how people make lives, assert rights, and build alternative futures collectively. In doing so, I grapple with the uncomfortable tensions, possibilities, and constraints at work within intimate ties.