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Introduction

Contextualizing development anthropology and the agency of migrant women in crisis settings

Cross-border and internal migration represents one of the major phenomena of contemporary globalization. It involves intertwined interactions across political, economic, environmental, and cultural processes, reflecting social transformation processes that affect both migrant people and receiving societies. It follows that migration cannot be figured out merely through demographic or economic indicators, but that it rather requires an interdisciplinary perspective accounting for the interactions between systemic constraints and human agency.[1]
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has estimated that more than 280 million people worldwide have been involved in migratory movements in 2020[2], a substantial proportion of which under conditions of forced displacement or humanitarian emergency. Among these numbers, women represent a steadily more significant portion of these flows, opposing the historically portrayed belief that migration would be predominantly male. It has also been recently highlighted how the feminization of migration results to be closely related to global inequalities, gendered forms of poverty and to patriarchal structures reproduced within both countries of origin and destination. Concurrently, migrant women still continue to be represented as subjects linked to victimhood narratives, jeopardising the active role that they play in migration processes. Though, they undertake nomadic journeys under extreme uncertainty while acting as mediators, caregivers, social actors capable of bringing on adaptive strategies and collective support practices. Recent scholarship has therefore begun to emphasize the need to understand migrant women no longer as subjects exposed to risk but as agents capable of producing social transformation.
The concept of resilience itself has emerged as a central category in studies concerning migration, humanitarian action and development.[3] Traditionally, it was defined as the capacity to cope with adversity and recover from traumatic experiences, maintaining developmental trajectories. Still, the popularity of the term across policy and development discourses spurred critiques as well. From an anthropological perspective, reducing resilience to the individual’s ability to adapt to adverse conditions risks naturalizing structural inequalities by shifting attention away from the political-economic-social processes that generate vulnerability.[4] Resilience narratives may indeed inadvertently celebrate communities’ capacity to survive under systemic marginalization and failing to address the structures that perpetuate these very same conditions.
This contribution proposes that the concept of resilience experienced by migrant women in emergency contexts should be understood primarily as a collective, relational, and socially embedded process. It will be treated as the interaction between personal experiences, social support networks and community practices. It has been noted indeed that migrant women frequently develop adaptive strategies through informal support systems, collective action, knowledge-sharing practices and everyday forms of resistance that defy representations of passivity. The analytical framework that was adopted draws upon development anthropology and migration studies and was purposely chosen to explore the ways in which migrant women act under conditions of crisis, by selecting case studies of women operating in humanitarian settings and by looking at their participation in local, transnational support networks and at their contribution to community resilience.

Theoretical framework

Development anthropology at the intersection of gender, migration, and resilience in emergencies

Understanding the role of migrant women in humanitarian emergencies demands an analytical framework suitable for bridging structural conditions, individual experiences, and collective practices. Indeed, their experiences cannot be adequately explained through single-factor explanations that separate vulnerability from agency. Development anthropology is considered to be the proper framework for analyzing the intersections of gender, migration, and resilience since it addresses structural inequalities, cultural meanings, and everyday practices of adaptation.
The adopted anthropological perspective recognizes migrant women the role of active social actors who
continuously negotiate, reinterpret, and transform their social realities, entailing three interconnected dimensions: the anthropological cognition of migration, the gendered dimensions of mobility and crisis, and the evolution of resilience within humanitarian practice. Unlike traditional modernization theories, development anthropology focuses on how social change is experienced through local knowledge, cultural contexts, and human agency, as well as on how development outcomes are shaped by local realities, cultural practices, and the agency of individuals and communities.[5] Within migration studies, this perspective contributed to move beyond purely demographic explanations of migration processes: as Castles argues, migration should be understood as a “fundamental component of broader processes of social transformation, involving complex interactions between global structural changes and local social realities”.[6] Migration is therefore here intended as a dynamic process through which individuals and communities negotiate changing forms of social organization, identity, and belonging. This results to be particularly relevant when examining women’s migration experiences, who have been historically portrayed as passive companions of male migrants or as dependent family members. Contemporary scholarship has demonstrated that women act as primary decision-makers, managing transnational family networks.[7]
At the same time, universalistic approaches to humanitarian intervention have been questioned by this theoretical framework, since anthropologists demonstrated that development and humanitarian programs operate through assumptions that fail to account for local realities and cultural practices, particularly in forced migration contexts, where imposed categories of vulnerability may blur capacities and forms of agency of the affected populations.[8] Besides the constructivist approach to migration, the feminization of international migration has transformed both migration studies and humanitarian research, too. Instead of analysing migrant women’s experiences simply through gender categories, scholars have emphasized the importance of intersectionality, recognizing that gender interacts with dimensions of social inequality such as ethnicity, class, nationality, religion, and age. Feminist anthropology demonstrated indeed that gender identities are socially constructed within specific historical and cultural contexts.[9] In humanitarian emergencies, these intersecting forms of inequality intensify existing vulnerabilities for irregular and refugee migrant women, who experience multiple layers of discrimination, including gender-based violence, economic exclusion, legal precarity, and restricted access to healthcare and social services. Yet, reducing migrant women’s experiences to vulnerability runs the risk of mirroring them in the so-called “deficit model” of migration[10], while women may simultaneously experience vulnerability and exercise agency, require protection while providing care, and suffer structural inequalities while actively transforming them. This ostensible contradiction challenges the binary distinction between vulnerability and agency that often characterizes rigid frameworks upon which humanitarian discourses continue to rely.
Lastly, the third dimension encompassed in the theoretical framing looks at the very concept of resilience, whose definitions vary considerably, though it is generally understood as the capacity to withstand, adapt to, or recover from adversity. One definition above all marked a significant shift away from viewing resilience as a fixed individual trait, emphasizing instead its relational scope: Masten conceptualizes it as “the capacity of a dynamic system to withstand or recover from significant threats to its stability, viability or development.” This draws upon the vast psychological literature that has identified self-efficacy, social support, meaning-making capacities as factors contributing to resilience. In migration contexts, resilience is usually associated with the ability to adapt to new social environments and reconstruct meaningful social relationships. However, significant criticisms argue that these frameworks individualize responsibility for structural problems by emphasizing adaptation rather than transformation; similarly, Liashenko believes that resilience has become a ‘pretty word’ in development research, since celebrating resilience without addressing their originating conditions risks legitimizing systems of inequality.[11]
Within studies of humanitarian interventions, some research conducted among Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank demonstrates how resilience narratives may contribute to the depoliticization of structural violence: rather than challenging systems of domination, resilience discourse may normalize conditions of marginalization.[12]
This paper argues that these critiques suggest the need to reconceptualize resilience as a collective and relational process, making resilience emerge through social relationships, community practices and collective forms of action. Evidences from migration studies prove that women develop resilience through participation in family networks, transnational community organizations, and informal support systems. Their resilience cannot be understood independently from the social contexts in which it is produced and it should not be conceptualised as a separate phenomenon from agency, rather as interconnected dimensions of everyday social practice, in order to enhance context-sensitive humanitarian interventions.

Ethnographic perspectives

From case studies on migrant women’s agency and networked resilience in humanitarian emergencies

The theoretical approach explained so far highlights the need to move beyond victimization narratives to acknowledge migrant women as active agents operating within complex contexts and emerging from the interplay between structural constraints and individual agency. In order to explore how these processes operate in real-world settings, an ethnographically informed perspective will be adopted drawing upon selected case studies that illustrate how migrant women construct resilience through everyday practices of adaptation.
Resorting to ethnographic approaches in humanitarian emergencies allows researchers to move beyond
fixed categories and quantitative indexes, focusing instead on social meanings. Indeed, ethnography enables to explore how individuals understand and respond to situations of displacement.[13] Within migration studies, ethnographic inquiry challenges essentialist understandings of migration experiences, and started studying them as a complex twine of identity, belonging and exclusion. Qualitative methodologies such as in-depth interviews and participant observation discovered that their experiences were shaped by structural constraints and agency.
By adopting a comparative qualitative approach based on three contemporary ethnographic studies in distinct humanitarian settings, it was possible to discern several commonalities on the production of resilience and collective strategies of adaptation. The following case studies were selected on the basis of the most accurate and latest sources related to the topic and on the basis of the personal experience of the author in some of these reception centres, namely: the case of irregular migrant women housed in humanitarian reception centers in Spain; Palestinian women living under conditions of prolonged occupation in the West Bank; refugee women from North African and Middle East countries resettled in Portugal.[14]Starting from the research conducted by Jiménez-Lasserrotte among irregular migrant women hosted in humanitarian reception centers in southern Spain, it demonstrates that adaptive capacities are progressively developed throughout women’s life trajectories rather than emerging exclusively after migration experiences, and proving that resilience often begins long before displacement itself.[15]
The participants of the field research are women coming from African countries, who experienced poverty, gender discrimination, and family responsibility that already required them to develop forms of resilience before leaving everything and everyone behind them. Within this frame, it was found out that women interpreted migration not merely as a consequence of vulnerability, but rather as an active strategy oriented at ensuring personal safety and at protecting family members, challenging traditional humanitarian narratives which portray migrant women as victims of external circumstances. Participants emphasized the importance of relationships established with family members, humanitarian workers, healthcare professionals, volunteers in facilitating adaptation and recovery, creating spaces of recognition and solidarity that enabled women to reinterpret traumatic experiences.
Similarly, Borges’ study on refugee women coming from African and Middle Eastern countries and now residing in Portugal demonstrates that migrant women’s agency is continuously shaped through the negotiation of both the dimensions of resistance and adaptation [16]: migration decisions were indeed reported by women themselves as acts of agency undertaken under conditions of severe constraint. After arriving in Portugal, those women kept on building resilience through educational opportunities, employment and community engagement, depicting it as a dynamic process embedded in social relationships. Drawing from the ethnographic research among Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank instead, the author of the reseach, Kayali, argues that many participants understood that international humanitarian interventions often contribute to normalize structural violence, in response to which they developed what was defined as “transformative incrementalism”, a collection of everyday practices that simultaneously function as survival, resistance, and social transformation mechanisms. In this sense, it is informal support systems as educational initiatives and caregiving activities that foster collective action able to draw alternative futures.
Collectively, these three cases underscore that migrant women’s agency is enacted through interconnected practices of adaptation, resistance, care, and social transformation. Far from being contradictory, vulnerability and agency appear to be mutually constitutive and continuously reshape one another throughout migration experiences. Through this comparison it emerges that adaptive capacities are rarely developed through isolated individual efforts, but rather through participation in networks of mutual support which contribute to the production of social belonging and identity. Concurrently, support networks often involve transnational forms of belonging that simultaneously connect migrant people to countries of origin and destination, de facto transcending national borders and contributing to the construction of multiple identities across different geographical contexts. These relational forms are closely linked to the circulation of situated knowledge: women share practical information concerning migration routes, administrative procedures, employment opportunities, healthcare access, childcare practices, playing a crucial role in shaping adaptive responses to environmental change. This methodology often remains invisible within conventional humanitarian frameworks, hence migrant women risk being recognized as recipients of humanitarian expertise rather than as producers of social knowledge.
In humanitarian contexts, where women assume pivotal roles in family care, these collective practices are often invisible although they constitute essential dimensions of community resilience. On the contrary, feminist scholarship stresses the focus on the importance of small-scale practices as mutual aid systems, cultural activities, and informal political participation to generate broader forms of social transformation. Women in Gaza are a compelling example of how mutual support and informal care systems contribute to preserve psychological well-being and collective identity, proving grassroots initiatives to be integral to humanitarian responses.[17] It follows that in order to be kept updated, development anthropology and humanitarian intervention approaches should start putting into practice the implication that migrant women cannot be considered as beneficiaries of humanitarian action anymore, but should be rather recognised as key actors in the production of social transformation, since women-led grassroots responses have become primary resources for participatory and anthropologically informed humanitarian interventions.

Understanding development interventions

Through women-led responses for inclusive emergency-development strategies

The challenge to the conventional categories implied in humanitarian interventions suggests to reconsider existing development frameworks moving beyond top-down approaches toward more participatory strategies. Women-led responses to humanitarian crises enable to rethink the relationship between humanitarian action and development interventions, integrating local knowledge, gender-centred perspectives and anthropological understandings of crisis response, to develop socially sustainable forms of humanitarian cooperation.
Examining women-led responses in emergency settings led to discover the complete inadequacy of representations that reduce migrant women to passive victims of displacement. Yet, the experiences of those resettled in Portugal describe migration decisions, adaptation strategies, and everyday practices of survival as deliberate responses to structural constraints rather than as purely reactive behaviors. Similarly, delving into the experiences of migrant women hosted in reception centers suggests the importance of community relationships and future-oriented aspirations in shaping adaptive responses to crisis situations. It follows that across diverse humanitarian contexts, although often rendered invisible within institutional humanitarian frameworks, care practices constitute essential mechanisms of social reproduction and collective survival.[18] These findings spur severe implications for humanitarian development interventions, since conventional approaches often prioritize measurable outputs, short-term outcomes, and institutional efficiency, concurrently undervaluing the social relationships through which resilience is actually produced. Accordingly, it can be inferred that humanitarian responses should prioritize supporting existing community capacities rather than attempting to replace them through externally designed interventions. Indeed, women-led responses exemplify the limitations of rigid distinctions between emergency assistance and long-term development: humanitarian emergencies do not represent temporary interruptions of ordinary life, but prolonged conditions requiring continuous adaptation. Consequently, resilience-building initiatives should not be conceptualized exclusively as post-crisis interventions, but rather as ongoing processes of social support.
In this sense, unlike traditional development paradigms, anthropological approaches emphasize the importance of local knowledge, cultural context and human agency in shaping developmental outcomes. Its critique of technocratic understandings of development demonstrates that externally imposed intervention models may produce unintended consequences when failing to engage with local social realities. In emergency settings, humanitarian interventions operate under conditions of urgency that limit opportunities for contextual understanding. For the case of resilience for example, anthropological scholarship and  studies of humanitarian interventions in conflict settings argue that resilience discourse may contribute to the normalization of structural inequalities by emphasizing communities’ capacities to adapt rather than addressing the conditions that produce vulnerability. As for the case of Palestinian women, international development programs have often promoted individualized understandings of resilience that obscure the structural dimensions of violence. However, these critiques do not suggest to exclude resilience as analytical category, rather to understand it in a way that recognizes its social, political, and cultural dimensions.
Additionally, ethnographic approaches enable to examine how individuals themselves interpret experiences of crisis and adaptation, and they do so by acknowledging the intersectionality of the anthropological approaches applied. Gender, ethnicity, class, age, legal status, and cultural identity interact to shape experiences of humanitarian crisis; it follows that, interventions based on homogeneous categories risk reproducing the very inequalities they seek to address.[19] Instead, anthropological analyses of intersectionality develop context-sensitive approaches and recognize diverse forms of vulnerability and agency.
The evidences drawn upon the women-led responses that have been displayed so far would suggest rethinking the future of humanitarian interventions, by moving beyond models based on temporary assistance toward approaches that recognize migrant women as active participants in resilience-building processes. Primarily, emergency responses should recognize migrant women as producers of knowledge rather than solely as recipients of expertise, as the greater participation of affected populations in decision-making processes contributes to develop more sustainable interventions.[20] Secondly, humanitarian strategies should prioritize collective and community-based approaches to resilience, spontaneously emerging through support networks and collective practices. This is so because interventions strengthening community structures prove to be more effective than approaches focused exclusively on individual adaptation. Additionally, supporting grassroots initiatives that usually possess extensive knowledge of social dynamics and culturally appropriate responses to crisis situations, should render their participation an essential component of humanitarian governance.
Ultimately, the boundary between humanitarian crisis and development context often appears to be blurred in situations of chronic displacement. As a result, it would be recommended for humanitarian and development interventions to adopt longer-term and more flexible frameworks to address the continuity between emergency response and social development.

Final remarks

Anthropological pathways for crisis-response humanitarian cooperation

The findings of the analysis presented in this paper aimed to demonstrate that migrant women’s experiences in crisis settings cannot be fairly interpreted through conventional dichotomies opposing vulnerability and agency or adaptation and resistance. Rather, it is suggested that these dimensions coexist and interact continuously throughout migration trajectories and emergency contexts for migrant women who experience structural inequalities while developing strategies of adaptation and social transformation.
Once embraced the methodology of development anthropology, the meaning of resilience should not be conceptualized as an individual psychological characteristic, but instead as a socially embedded, relational, and historically situated process developed through interactions among community networks. Additionally, the ethnographically-oriented comparison between three different crisis-based cases reveals that migrant women’s resilience originates long before humanitarian intervention occurs, as their episodes of forced displacement make them nurture adaptive capacities to mobilize throughout resettlement processes. Meanwhile, resilience is continuously reinforced through support networks, collective practices and forms of shared knowledge enabling women to reconstruct social belonging. Within this frame, the key argument of this paper is to recognise migrant women as active producers of social meanings, and that the local knowledge systems they build as everyday practices of care pave the way for new forms of humanitarian interventions.
Instead of contributing to the normalization of structural inequalities in the case of adaptation being privileged over social transformation, rethinking the role of migrant women helps understanding resilience as the capacity to challenge, negotiate, and transform those conditions through collective action. It follows that, the grounds of current humanitarian cooperation interventions require a transformative shift from models based on dependency and passive care, toward the prioritization of participation and local agency. Such a transformation implies expanding humanitarian principles of care to include greater recognition of affected populations as actors capable of contributing to the design of humanitarian responses. Indeed, future crisis-response strategies may benefit from adopting participatory and ethnographically informed approaches capable of incorporating local experiences; consequently, institutional recognition should be granted to those women-led initiatives that constitute the primary mechanisms of resilience in emergency contexts.
If development anthropology indeed offers a worthwhile framework for rethinking humanitarian cooperation in prolonged crisis environments, emphasizing the relationship between agency, vulnerability, resistance, local knowledge and global interventions, then anthropological perspectives may develop more inclusive and socially sustainable responses to humanitarian emergencies.
As contemporary crises become so inextricably interconnected, recognizing migrant women as producers of social transformation may enact one of the key opportunities for the future of international humanitarian cooperation.

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[1] Castles, S. (2010). Understanding Global Migration: A Social Transformation Perspective. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36, no. 10: 1565–1586.

[2] McAuliffe, M., & Khadria, B. (Eds.). (2019). World Migration Report 2020; International Organization for Migration (IOM). (2024). International Organization for Migration. World Migration Report 2024. International Organization for Migration. Geneva.

[3] Luthar, S. S. (2006). Resilience in Development: A Synthesis of Research Across Five Decades. Developmental Psychopathology.

[4] Masten, A. (2001). Ordinary Magic: Resilience Processes in Development. American Psychologist 56, no. 3: 227–238.

[5] Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

[6] Castles, S. (2010). Understanding global migration: A social transformation perspective. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36 (10), 1565–1586.

[7] Jiménez-Lasserrotte, M. et al. (2024). Understanding Resilience among Migrant Women.

[8] Brettell, C. (2006). Global Spaces/Local Places: Transnationalism, Diaspora, and the Meaning of Home. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 13, no. 3,327–334.

[9] Shahrokhi, S. (2020). Gender and Sexuality: An Anthropological Approach. Ethnology, Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology, UNESCO-EOLSS.

[10] KC, S. (2025). The Untold Stories of Resilience, Reworking and Resistance of Ageing Non-European Migrant Women. European Journal of Social Work 28.

[11] Liashenko, J. (2025). Resilience. Annals of Anthropological Practice 49: e70001.

[12] Kayali, L. (2025). Transformative Incrementalism: Palestinian Women’s Strategies of Resistance and Resilience amid Gendered Insecurity and Neoliberal Co-optation. Security Dialogue 56.

[13] Hall, K., Davis, J. L. (2021). Ethnography and the shifting semiotics of gender and sexuality. The Cambridge handbook of language, gender, and sexuality. Cambridge University Press.

[14] The author of this paper was hosted to work in some of these reception centres first as a volunteer with a local NGO and later as a field assistant and member of the logistic team (Ceuta, Morocco – Spain).

[15] Jiménez-Lasserrotte, M. M., et al. (2024). Understanding resilience among migrant women in a humanitarian reception center: A qualitative study. Frontiers in Public Health, 12, 1372900.

[16] Borges, G. M. (2025). Fighting back, moving forward: Refugee women’s agency in stories of resistance and resilience. Critical Criminology, 33, 231–249.

[17] Hamamra, B., Mahamid, F., Bdier, D. (2025). Surviving trauma: Gazan women’s mental health during genocide. Discover Public Health, 22, 229.

[18] Smarika, KC. (2025). The Untold Stories of Resilience, Reworking and Resistance of Ageing Non-European Migrant Women. European Journal of Social Work 28, no.2: 354-365.

[19] Shahrokhi, S. (2020). Gender and Sexuality: An Anthropological Approach. Ethnology, Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology (UNESCO-EOLSS).

[20] Ravera, F. et al. (2016). Gender Perspectives in Resilience, Vulnerability and Adaptation to Global Environmental Change. Ambio 45, Suppl.3.: S235-S247.

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