Violence Against Women, Displacement, and Religion

Violence Against Women, Displacement, and Religion challenges dominant secular protection paradigms and offers a critical intervention in debates on humanitarian reform by placing religion and women's lived experiences at the centre of an integrated intersectional and socioecological analysis. It argues that religion is an integral part of displaced women's lives, often little understood, which requires a balanced engagement to resource protection. Challenging dominant secular protection paradigms, this volume introduces an innovative framework for understanding religion in displaced women's experiences of violence. Drawing on mixed-methods research with humanitarian practitioners and displaced women from African and Levantine regions in Türkiye and Tunisia, it centres displaced women's voices and brings readers into Christian and Muslim survivors' intimate relationships with the sacred. The volume reveals how religion shifts across the social ecology of displacement—often as a resource for resilience when formal systems thin out and sometimes as a source of intersectional vulnerability. Through rich empirical evidence and interdisciplinary analysis, the volume argues that humanitarian systems secularize women's experiences, even though religion is central to their lives. By bridging humanitarian and religious systems, this book calls for building an intersectional ecology of protection to improve outcomes for displaced women. This timely volume complements debates on humanitarian reset and innovative approaches to financing refugee responses by advancing conceptual innovations such as the spiral continuum of violence, religion as a shifting intersectional vulnerability factor, the Conservation of Religious Resources and adaptive religious coping, and the spectrum of religious inclusion and exclusion. It bridges humanitarian, migration and religious systems to propose an intersectional ecology of protection. Interdisciplinary and empirically rich, this work makes a significant contribution to scholarship on gender, religion, forced migration, and humanitarianism, while offering practical insights for policy and practice. It seeks to disrupt disengaged scholarship and policy, offering new pathways for integrating religion, faith, and spirituality into humanitarian and migration policy and practice, while spotlighting women's agency. An open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.

Sandra Pertek is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. She previously held academic posts at Queen Margaret University and the University of Birmingham, including an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her research examines the intersections of gender, violence, religion, forced migration, and humanitarianism, drawing on extensive fieldwork across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. She has led multiple research projects and multi-stakeholder engagements, advised international and governmental organizations, and previously served as a senior policy adviser. She currently directs the Making Aid Work for Displaced Women initiative and publishes widely on gender, religion, and forced displacement, bridging theory, policy, and practice.