Empowering Women in the Fractured Cities: Developing capacity, advocacy, and partnerships in South-eastern Turkey

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project will draw on original empirical research to explore how women and girls have been affected by urban warfare between Turkish state forces and Kurdish insurgents in majority-Kurdish populated urban residential areas of Southeast Turkey in 2015-16. Although c.355,000-500,000 people were displaced from their permanent residences and up to one million severely affected, there has been no in-depth analysis of the impacts on the region. Forced resettlement of up to 100,000 locals into state-built blocks by the Housing Development Administration of Turkey (TOKI) to support the government's capital inflows has not been studied either. In this context, this project, with its interdisciplinary and feminist approach, is pioneering, original and urgent. Studying displaced women and girls is particularly significant as those who have been relocated have been experiencing livelihood deprivation, marginalisation, exclusion, domestic violence, subjugation, and detachment from their daily socio-cultural practices and relations (DITAM, UN, International Crisis Group) and there is no support and advocacy structure in place to address their socio-cultural, economic and psychosocial issues. Four research questions drive the project: 1) To what extent and how do urban warfare, forced displacements and forced evictions impact on the physical, mental and psychosocial health and well-being of women and girls?2) What are the impacts of resettlement in state-built high-rise blocks on the socio-cultural and traditional home-based economic practices and overall well-being of women and girls?3) How do women and girls perceive their situation, and what are their aspirations, regarding empowerment, health, workload, access to resources, and both state and domestic violence against them with their new socio-spatial dynamics, and what are their adaptation strategies to cope with the changes? 4) What public services are currently available to women and girls, and how can the knowledge gap about their health and wellbeing be addressed, thereby the generation of synergies between research, advocacy and capacity building enabling effective services so that long-term health effects can be diminished, and possibilities of employment and safety enhanced?Through addressing these questions, the objectives are: (1) to elucidate the socio-cultural, health, well-being and economic impacts of armed conflicts, state interventions, forced displacement and resettlement in high-rise blocks on women and girls through five field sites; (2) to explore how women and girls have remade their domestic spaces and reshaped home-based economic practices in their new urban dwellings; (3) to identify these affected women and girls, building capacity amongst them, our partner organisations and related advocacy groups, practitioners and institutions at international, national and regional level; (4) to provide the agile response necessary to create knowledge for appropriate policymaking, actions and advocacy in the context of gender-based violence, marginalisation and deprivation in these cities. The project will directly benefit the local communities, but also surrounding countries suffering from conflict-induced displacements and Kurds in other sovereign countries due to internal political conjunctures, the Syrian civil war and the long-lasting impacts of ISIS in the Middle East. By adopting a gendered and multidisciplinary approach, this research would also have economic and societal impacts within and beyond the project's lifecycle, offering a framework for collaborative, democratic and egalitarian research with social justice and social change at its core; building the research and advocacy capacity of project partners and helping policymakers to formulate evidence-based policies to manage issues related to gender equality, large-scale forced displacement, resettlement, and sustainable and inclusive development in the post-conflict contexts of Global South.