“IDEAL” REFUGEE WOMEN AND GENDER EQUALITY MAINSTREAMING IN THE SAHRAWI REFUGEE CAMPS: “GOOD PRACTICE” FOR WHOM? Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh* The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Executive Committee and the Refugee Women and Gender Equality Unit within the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have both asserted that the Algerian-based National Union of Sahrawi Women is an “ideal” partner by virtue of its success in main- streaming gender equality and empowering Sahrawi refugee women. In this article, I examine the nature and implications of this idealization of the protracted Sahrawi refugee camps, arguing that international celebrations of the National Union of Sahrawi Women and the refugee women it purports to represent have directly influ- enced the development of projects in the camps that marginalize the needs and priorities of “non-ideal” women and girls with grave effects. As such, I suggest that while refugees and their political representatives may formally adopt donors’ rhetoric and preferences vis-a `-vis gender equality mainstreaming, such strategies may facilitate and solidify processes of exclusion and marginalization in different contexts of displacement. Concurrently, this leads us to ask who benefits from asser- tions and categorizations of “ good” and “ bad” practice, and whose interests are advanced by discourses surrounding “ gender equality”. 1. Introduction Development and humanitarian projects have increasingly integrated elements of “the trinity of democratisation, good governance and women’s rights”, 1 with * Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh is Departmental Lecturer in Forced Migration at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Acknowledgments and thanks are due to Dr Dawn Chatty for granting access to the project Children and Adolescents in Sahrawi and Afghan Refugee Households: Living with the Effects of Prolonged Armed Conflict and Forced Migration (SARC) data-set referred to in this article, to the Editor of this Special Issue for her invaluable comments on an earlier version of this article, and to Yousif M. Qasmiyeh for his support and critical feedback throughout the course of this research, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (United Kingdom). 1 D. Kandiyoti, “Political Fiction Meets Gender Myth: Post-conflict Reconstruction, ‘Democratisation’ and Women’s Rights”, IDS Bulletin, 35(4), 2004, 134. Refugee Survey Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2 ß UNHCR [2010]. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org DOI:10.1093/rsq/hdq023 at Radcliffe Science Library, Bodleian Library on April 21, 2011 rsq.oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from