The Hidden Costs of Celebrating Syrian Women’s ‘Resilience’ and Questions of Return
Mona Hedaya, Research Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies
Introduction
Since the onset of the Syrian crisis, the discourse of resilience has evolved from a humanitarian descriptor into a political and moral tool for shaping international responses to mass displacement. Over the past decade, donor states, UN agencies, and humanitarian organizations have embraced resilience not merely as a coping mechanism, but as a normative framework, recasting crisis-affected individuals as adaptable actors capable of rebuilding their lives with minimal external intervention. In this context, resilience is no longer a psychological trait; it has become a policy doctrine used to justify restrained engagement and limited institutional responsibility.
Yet, beneath the surface of this seemingly empowering narrative lies a more troubling reality. In practice, resilience in the Syrian displacement context has often meant surviving despite abandonment. Rather than signaling recovery, it has frequently reflected the absence or failure of structural support, placing the burden of adaptation on individuals, especially women, while absolving institutions of their obligations. The valorization of resilience has, in many cases, lightened the ethical and political load for humanitarian actors, suggesting that those who “endure” need only minimal assistance and fewer protections.
This article offers a critical reflection on how the resilience discourse has been mobilized in relation to Syrian refugee women, particularly those who became sole providers for their families in Istanbul between 2011 and 2018. Drawing from qualitative fieldwork, later published in book form, I examine how these women experienced resilience not as a form of agency, but as a condition imposed in the absence of choice—what scholars term resilience by default. Public narratives that celebrate these women as models of strength and adaptability often obscure the structural voids they must navigate daily.
Rather than dismissing the concept entirely, this article interrogates the consequences of treating resilience as an individual virtue. It argues that such framings not only misrepresent the lived experiences of refugee women, but also contribute to the erosion of political and institutional accountability, especially as attention shifts toward return and reconstruction in Syria. In doing so, the article calls for a shift from romanticized narratives of endurance to ones grounded in justice, responsibility, and structural support.
Transformations of the Concept: From Developmental Psychology to Policy Doctrine
The concept of resilience originated in the field of developmental psychology, where it was understood as an individual’s capacity to “bounce back” from trauma through emotional regulation, support networks, and adaptive behaviors. Crucially, this early framing emphasized not only personal traits but also the importance of enabling environments—community support, education, and care systems—as essential for recovery.
However, over the past two decades, resilience migrated into the realm of public policy, especially following major global crises such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the global food crisis. International organizations increasingly adopted it as a flexible policy tool, reframing it from a therapeutic concept into a programmatic objective. In this shift, resilience lost much of its psychological nuance and became a catch-all term to justify technocratic interventions, often without meaningful political engagement or accountability. It was less about recovery and more about managing populations deemed “at risk.”
In the context of humanitarian policy, particularly under the influence of neoliberal thought, resilience began to serve a different purpose: shifting responsibility from institutions to individuals. As Naomi Klein argues in The Shock Doctrine, crises are frequently used as opportunities to restructure societies through privatization and the withdrawal of state services. Resilience, in this framework, becomes a rhetorical device to naturalize institutional retreat, portraying individual adaptation not as a burden, but as an opportunity.
Anthropological work by Gatter (2025) in Azraq camp illustrates how resilience is used not to measure systems of care, but to evaluate refugee performance under conditions of abandonment. It becomes an indicator of how well people survive without support, rather than a critique of the absence of that support.
Increasingly, resilience is not merely a descriptive term, but an organizing principle for humanitarian responses. Rather than investing in long-term social infrastructure, the dominant logic shifts to “empowering communities to care for themselves.” While this rhetoric of empowerment may appear progressive, it often rests on false assumptions: that communities possess sufficient internal resources, that vulnerability is temporary, and that state withdrawal is a neutral process. In practice, resilience frequently becomes a justification for chronic underinvestment in protection, education, livelihoods, and mental health services.
In the Syrian context, this logic has been replicated widely. Regional and international humanitarian actors have adopted resilience as a guiding principle, using it as an interpretive lens to frame refugee experiences. As noted earlier, this framing is not neutral. Many programs are designed based on the assumed capacity for self-reliance and are evaluated accordingly. Root causes of vulnerability, such as lack of legal status, exploitative labor markets, and housing insecurity, are often sidelined. In such frameworks, resilience shifts from being a situational response to hardship to a performance metric for justifying reduced institutional presence and downsized protection mandates.
Case Study: Syrian Female Breadwinners in Istanbul
Between 2011 and 2018, I conducted qualitative fieldwork with Syrian refugee women in Istanbul, most of whom had become the sole providers for their families. Many had lost their husbands to the war, or were separated from them by displacement, and found themselves thrust into unfamiliar roles in an unfamiliar city. With no legal protections and limited access to social services, they were compelled to navigate the informal labor market, survive on humanitarian aid, or adopt survivalist financial strategies, all while caring for children, often alone.
While some women demonstrated remarkable ingenuity, such as Safaa, who worked as a caregiver, Arabic teacher, writer, and children’s art instructor in her neighborhood, these examples were the exception, not the rule. More often than not, such stories are highlighted by institutions to illustrate the success of “resilient women,” inadvertently masking the structural abandonment they faced. These narratives risk being instrumentalized to justify austerity in humanitarian programming and to obscure the lack of meaningful support systems.
According to labor data, nearly 99 percent of Syrian women working in Turkey are employed in the informal sector. They work without contracts or social protections, often for long hours and exploitative wages. Syrian women earn, on average, 20 percent less than Syrian men, and far less than their Turkish counterparts in formal employment. More than half of the women I interviewed reported working over 10 hours a day, with no time off and no health coverage. As one woman put it: “I do everything just so we don’t get evicted. I have no time to get sick or even think.”
This situation mirrors trends across host countries such as Jordan and Lebanon, where displaced women are expected to hold together households without formal recognition or protection.
Although livelihood support programs exist, they often fail to account for the intersecting burdens these women carry as mothers, wage earners, and urban refugees navigating unfamiliar legal and linguistic environments. Many programs are designed with generic assumptions about entrepreneurial potential or vocational retraining, but they rarely address underlying vulnerabilities like childcare responsibilities, trauma, or documentation barriers. Few participants were able to resume education, validate prior degrees, or invest in long-term economic ventures. In this sense, resilience functioned not as empowerment, but as a short-term survival mechanism.
Importantly, the strategies most of these women employed were not based on stable internal capacity, but what could be called a desperation economy, characterized by informal loans, dependency on extended kinship networks, and rotating debt. These coping mechanisms were deeply fragile. As time passed, they often transitioned from temporary solutions to permanent states of exhaustion. One woman described it succinctly: “We are alive, but barely.”
As Didier Fassin reminds us in his work on the moral economy of survival, endurance under such conditions is frequently normalized, not recognized as a symptom of systemic injustice, but framed as stoic necessity. Syrian women in Istanbul were not celebrated for flourishing under adversity, but were rather left to endure it alone.
The Hidden Cost of Romanticizing Resilience
Despite the clarity of these challenges, humanitarian discourse continues to frame women’s ability to “cope” as a moral and programmatic achievement. Reports, campaigns, and donor narratives often celebrate displaced women as beacons of strength and inspiration—symbols of endurance in the face of adversity. This framing reflects what feminist scholars describe as the feminization of responsibility: the tendency to offload the burdens of survival, care, and cohesion onto women, without equipping them with the power, protections, or resources to carry those burdens sustainably.
Such portrayals obscure the coercive contexts from which resilience emerges. As Judith Butler argues in Precarious Life, when people are expected to endure systemic failure without accountability from those responsible, their endurance becomes a condition of exclusion, not a sign of agency. In this framing, survival becomes a requirement for visibility, while suffering becomes a precondition for moral recognition.
A 2025 study in Ethnos underscores this point, showing how refugee women are tasked with preserving social cohesion amid displacement, often in the absence of institutional support. Resilience, in this sense, becomes not only a descriptive term but a moral obligation—an expectation that reinforces, rather than redresses, structural inequality.
Many of the Syrian women I interviewed echoed this dynamic. Phrases like “we have no choice,” “what can we do?” and “we’re forced to” recurred throughout the fieldwork. These were not expressions of empowered adaptation, but of resignation to necessity. When resilience is rooted not in opportunity but in the absence of alternatives, celebrating it becomes ethically fraught. It risks valorizing survival as success, and invisibilizing the toll it takes on bodies, minds, and futures.
Moreover, this celebratory framing can carry real material consequences. A 2020 report by The New Humanitarian documented cases where aid was scaled back in communities perceived as “resilient” based on the flawed logic that those who endure need less support. In these instances, resilience becomes a punitive metric: the more effectively people cope, the less assistance they receive.
In short, the discourse of resilience is not neutral. It can function as a smokescreen, used to justify withdrawal, defer accountability, and frame endurance as proof of institutional effectiveness. When weaponized in this way, resilience is no longer a story of strength. It is a euphemism for abandonment.
Between Exile and Return
The problematic framing of resilience does not end in exile; it reappears, with new urgency, in conversations around “return.” As international actors increasingly promote the idea of voluntary repatriation, the resilience once demanded of refugee women in displacement is now being re-scripted as a precondition for reintegration into a shattered homeland.
Between December 2024 and February 2025, UNHCR recorded the return of approximately 279,620 Syrian refugees. Yet, the context of these returns remains dire. According to 2025 World Bank figures, over 90 percent of the Syrian population lives below the poverty line, and the country’s GDP has plummeted by 84 percent since 2010. Despite these conditions, some regional and international actors have begun encouraging return, sometimes through subtle coercion, such as aid cuts in host countries, or through vague incentive programs that obscure the structural fragility awaiting returnees.
Crucially, many of these return programs rely on the same logic that underpins the resilience discourse: the assumption that communities, particularly women, will once again “make do.” However, return cannot be treated as a humanitarian checkbox. It is a political process that demands institutional reform, legal guarantees, and economic reconstruction, none of which currently exist in meaningful form. Without transitional justice mechanisms or safeguards against re-persecution, return risks replicating the same cycle of abandonment.
For the women I interviewed, the idea of return evoked anxiety, not hope. One participant reflected: “We already started over from zero once. We’re still paying the price. I don’t want to go back and pay it all over again.” Their reluctance was not rooted in disloyalty or fear of change; it stemmed from the recognition that resilience had already cost them too much. To expect them to endure yet another round of uncertainty without structural support is to double down on the very failures that displaced them in the first place.
Indeed, as resilience narratives increasingly seep into reconstruction frameworks, they risk being deployed to justify a premature shift from relief to development without addressing the political and economic foundations of crisis. Programs emphasizing “community-based” recovery often sidestep systemic reform, offering symbolic inclusion instead of actual transformation. In this way, the language of resilience becomes complicit in normalizing return under unsafe, unsustainable, and unjust conditions.
Reframing Resilience: From Individual Virtue to Collective Responsibility
This article does not call for the abandonment of the concept of resilience, but for its reclamation and reframing. Rather than celebrating endurance as a moral virtue, we must interrogate the structures that make such endurance necessary in the first place. When people are forced to shoulder burdens beyond their control, their survival is not a testament to empowerment, but a warning sign of institutional failure.
Reframing resilience means rejecting the idea that survival under duress is evidence of success. Humanitarian actors must shift the metrics by which interventions are evaluated—from whether individuals manage to persist, to whether they are able to live in dignity and security. This requires rethinking the language, tools, and funding mechanisms that currently reward endurance while punishing vulnerability.
Critically, it also means redistributing responsibility away from individuals and back onto the institutions, donors, and governments whose obligations have been outsourced or deferred. If humanitarian actors continue to reference women’s resilience in policy frameworks, they must also reckon with the ethical implications of doing so: Can resilience continue to be demanded while protections remain absent, and return is promoted without rebuilding?
As Gatter (2025) argues, the growing use of “resilience” in post-conflict reconstruction often legitimizes international retreat, framing empowerment as self-reliance, and recovery as a matter of attitude rather than access. In this sense, resilience becomes a policy instrument, not a lived condition. It is deployed to justify reduced aid, diminished state obligations, and a narrowing of rights under the guise of local empowerment.
The issue is not that women are incapable of resilience. It is that they are perpetually required to perform it without choice, without rest, and without protection. Humanitarian discourse, when it romanticizes this performance, contributes to entrenching the very systems it claims to address.
To move beyond symbolic recognition, we must interrogate the narratives we elevate and the policies we enact. Resilience without institutional backing is not heroism, but rather abandonment disguised as admiration. It is a political scar mistaken for strength. Honoring refugee women, therefore, must mean more than telling their stories; it must involve building the conditions under which such stories no longer have to be told.
This article is part of a series of articles commissioned under the ‘Resilience and Inclusive Politics in the Arab Region’, generously funded by the Carnegie Corporation.