Institute for History Annual Report 2010 - O - Universiteit Leiden

for men and women.
Women at Risk? Male and Female Asylum
Seekers in the Dutch Asylum Procedure
1945-2000 (PhD-project) Tycho Walaardt
Various researchers have raised the issue that
female asylum seekers were granted more often
refugee status than male asylum seekers in the
Dutch asylum procedure. Jurists, sociologists and
anthropologists gave several reasons why women
are more successful within this procedure, but
mostly these explanations are rather speculative.
They also lack an historical component. The
above-mentioned favourable position of women
contrasts sharply with the dominant image of a
refugee: a political active male dissident. In my
dissertation I will try to answer the question how
and why gender played a role in the asylum procedure
since the Second World War. The contents
of individual case files of asylum seekers, present
in the IND-archive, will be my main source of
information. My hypothesis is that the arguments
used by advocates of female asylum seekers to
protest against a negative decision of the IND
differed from the arguments used by advocates of
their male counterparts. An advocate might be the
individual himself, but could also be a friend, a
relative, a colleague, a member of a refugee aid
organization, a lawyer, a representative of a
ministry, a politician, etc. By doing longitudinal
research it seems plausible to distinguish
constants, which were raised to defend male and
female asylum seekers during different periods.
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Transnational Ties with the Country of
Origin: Moroccan Migrants and Their
Descendants in the Netherlands, 1960-2000
(PhD-project) Nadia Bouras
Research shows that transnational participation is
supposedly gendered. The field of institutional
and public transnational activities is mostly a
male-dominated area, whereas women are more
engaged in the social life of the receiving society.
These differential forms of gender participation in
transnational and local contexts are related to the
fact that migration has different outcomes for men
and women. Transnational ties imply the ways in
which transmigrants maintain, build and reinforce
multiple linkages with their country of origin and
the country of settlement. In my research I explore
the linkages first and second generation
Moroccans in the Netherlands maintain with their
country of origin from a gender perspective. The
implications of transnational-ism for both first en
second generation Moroccan men and women will
be considered. I will first explore the role migrant
men and women of the first generation play in the
maintenance of transnational ties, in which the
gendered differences over time will be explained.
Secondly, I will examine how these transnational
linkages differ from the ties second generation
Moroccans maintain.
Ethnically Mixed Relationships in a
Postcolonial Context, 1945-2000 (PhDproject)
Charlotte Laarman
My research focuses on mixed relationships of