Abstract:

Despite hosting most global refugees, emerging economies remain understudied in refugee integration literature, which predominantly examines developed-country contexts with robust institutions and formal labor markets. This paper extends Gilodi et al.'s (2024) Multi-Layered Vulnerability Framework to emerging economy contexts, focusing on how refugee women navigate integration through informal economies. Drawing on intersectionality theory and Qin's (2025) security capital concept, we identify security capital deficits as the primary mechanism through which structural characteristics of emerging economies translate into gendered integration experiences. The framework reveals how the systematic absence of employment-based, citizenship-based, and embodied security capital forces refugee women into substitution processes, accessing immediate survival through patron-client relationships, ethnic networks, and religious communities, that paradoxically prevent long-term security accumulation. This creates circular rather than linear integration pathways. We introduce two concepts: "substitutive discrimination," where informal barriers replace formal ones without legal recourse, and "collective conversion failure," wherein individual survival strategies collectively reinforce structural vulnerabilities. The framework demonstrates that emerging economy conditions operate as active structuring forces rather than mere absences of formal support. By revealing how vulnerability becomes self-reinforcing, this extension provides theoretical tools for understanding why refugee women's integration in emerging economies differs qualitatively from integration in developed contexts.

Please choose your submission type: Full Paper

Primary Track: Human Resource Management

Keywords: Organizational behaviour and psychological state;International HRM;Diversity and equality

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Mr. Eduardo Artavia-Cuadra