The UN’s sustainable development goals 5 and 8 in Lebanon: women migrant domestic workers sustaining Lebanese lives while resisting the kafala system

Ramon Icart, Lara

The UN’s sustainable development goals 5 and 8 in Lebanon: women migrant domestic workers sustaining Lebanese lives while resisting the kafala system

Citation

Ramon Icart, L. The UN’s sustainable development goals 5 and 8 in Lebanon: women migrant domestic workers sustaining Lebanese lives while resisting the kafala system. 2021. handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10230/49099

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Abstract

Women migrant domestic workers of African and South-Asian origin are the main care providers for the Lebanese society. Nevertheless, the political and legal frameworks governing their living and working conditions in the country are not aimed at ensuring their wellbeing but rather the opposite: they facilitate their exploitation and discrimination. Exploring the complexity of care work and its relations to gender, class, race and colonial power relations within the current dynamics of global capitalism is the aim of this thesis. I particularly examine how gendered domestic work and global migratory dynamics come about in the specific legal, political, economic and social context of Lebanon in the form of the abusive and exploitative kafala system in order to assess the implementation of SDGs 5 and 8 in the country. I do so by engaging in a survey of academic literature conceptualizing global care chains (Hochschild, 2000; Pérez-Orozco, 2019), applying a sociological lens to processes of ‘othering’ within the Lebanese society form an intersectional feminist approach (Arsan, 2019) and defining the abuses suffered as human trafficking, forced labour and modern slavery. Interviews with organized migrant domestic workers contribute to the discussion with an updated analysis of the new current scenario in Lebanon shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic and the alarming economic crisis in which the country is entrenched. It also challenges the portrayal of migrant domestic workers as passive victims. I finally suggest specific recommendations to improve the worryingly deficient implementation of SDGs 5 and 8 in the country.