Defining women’s empowerment in women and girl safe spaces: a call for collective self-determination

Women and girl safe spaces (or “safe spaces”) are increasingly being implemented in contexts of forced displacement. With little research on safe spaces, their design and implementation has often relied on toolkits and practice guides that standardise how empowerment is defined and pursued within them. Drawing on my feminist ethnography of a safe space for Syrian refugee women in Beqaa valley, Lebanon, I share four women’s stories of (dis)empowerment in and because of the safe space. These women’s stories highlight the unintended negative consequences when meanings attached to empowerment are imposed by the organisation or not shared among women. Embracing collective self-determination over definitions of empowerment and its pursuit, instead, enables women to negotiate, organise, and work together to determine the shared meaning and future direction, because having collective power over the definition and pursuit of empowerment is also having power over what is deemed possible.