[Book Review]: "Deconstructing Refugee Women’s Empowerment: A Comparative Approach to British and French Aid Structures"

Abstract

In Deconstructing Refugee Women’s Empowerment, Kılıc¸oglu � criticizes the victim-agent dichotomy and examines the empowerment of refugee women through a comparative perspective of aid structures in the UK and France. Drawing on Mohanty’s critique of Western feminism’s homogenization of Third World women and Spivak’s argument on the subaltern’s silencing, she shows how colonial hierarchies shape aid structures in Europe. The book’s central argument is that empowerment is not a universal or neutral concept. It is a politically constructed process embedded in colonial histories and national citizenship models that determine both the definition of empowerment itself and which refugee women ‘deserve’ to be empowered...