Female refugee networks: Rebuilding post-conflict identity

Abstract

The typical refugee has not only fled her native country and been evicted from her native social architecture, but also her sense of personhood has been displaced. She is faced with the daunting need to relocate self in a new cultural space. Re-establishing a life after the crisis often means resettlement in a new home country where smooth resettlement often hinges on the refugee's ability to rebuild her social network in the host culture. The purpose of this study is to describe the social architecture of female refugee identity. A multiple case study of seventeen (N=17) female refugees, representing 135 relational ties, is used to explore the composition of refugee social networks from 14 different countries in order to understand intercultural identity from a socio-structural perspective. The study demonstrates that refugees occupy a relationally thin identity space; commonly that means a high-density, low-heterogeneity, small network that leaves very little flexibility for new identity formation. The mean network heterogeneity across all cases was 0.27, indicating a low presence of host nationals in the networks. Working from their stories of liminality and the search for communitas, the study provides insight into the variability within social architectures for refugee identity and the particular acculturation narratives represented within a socio-structural space of redefinition. The study furthers our understanding of the interconnections between structural properties and communicative properties of identity formation through the depiction of female refugee-immigrant ethno-graphs.