Practicing Conformity, Resistance and Resilience to Gender-Based Violence: Women Asylum Seekers in the Eastern Mediterranean

In this paper, we use semi -structured interviews with 35 asylum -seeking women to elicit a narrative of their forced migration journey which included a stop in Turkey, a perilous sea crossing facilitated by smugglers and a stay in a European Union borderland, Greece. We explore their experiences with a focus on the adversities they faced, especially gender -based violence, woven in the broader violence of mobility under restrictive border and asylum regimes. Their interaction with the environment reveals a range of responses of conformity with, and resistance to, unequal social relations and discriminatory cultural practices. We conceptualize these responses as resilience, a process in the making, shaped by practices - thoughts, emotions and embodied acts - rather than an achieved state. We understand resilience as a process built through the use of personal but also communal resources, according to the social ecology model. In this paper, we focus on the individual resilient responses, the "resilient moves" of women in the refugee context of the Eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, the women's identifying and naming of the hardships they face point to the social structures that these hardships are rooted in, thus requiring interventions in social policies and institutional practices.