Challenging the ‘Migration‐for‐Safety’ Narrative: Gendered Necropolitics, Affectivity and Resilience Across Women's Forced Journeys

ABSTRACT

This article challenges the ‘migration‐for‐safety’ narrative by examining how women fleeing coercive contexts encounter violence as a cross‐border continuum in Germany. Following on the concept of necropolitics, it demonstrates how hierarchies of human worth are reproduced through the continuum of violence, foregrounding its affective dimensions. The analysis traces affectivity as a technology of domination and as a resource for care and resistance among migranticized women. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with migranticized women, the analysis identifies three themes: (1) seeking security within shifting expectations of safety; (2) invisibilization and struggles for recognition; and (3) imposed (im)mobility and changing care networks. These findings demonstrate how gendered necropolitics operate across borders and scales, sustaining the debilitation of ‘refugee women’ while also revealing their situated forms of resistance and care. Linking necropolitics, the continuum of violence and affectivity, the article shows how domination and resistance are co‐constituted in everyday life transcending liberal/authoritarian divides.