Neither Free nor Forced: Survival Entrepreneurship, Household Governance, and Constrained Labor Among Displaced Syrian Women

Entrepreneurship is widely promoted as a pathway to refugee self-reliance, yet the conditions under which entrepreneurial livelihoods unfold, and the forms of labor they generate, remain underexamined. This study investigates how displacement and patriarchal household relations shape refugee women’s entrepreneurship, asking when survival-oriented enterprise produces labor vulnerability rather than alleviating it. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research with Syrian refugee women entrepreneurs in Lebanon, the study reveals that entrepreneurship emerges primarily as a survival response to exclusion and precarity rather than an opportunity-driven choice. As a result, entrepreneurial activity becomes embedded within informal, relationally governed arrangements that intensify dependency and constrain exit, while women’s labor is regulated through overlapping household expectations, kinship obligations, and gendered moral economies that reproduce unprotected, difficult-to-exit work. The study shows that entrepreneurship and labor vulnerability may be co-constituted, repositions households as institutions of labor governance, and bridges entrepreneurship and forced labor scholarship by demonstrating how constrained labor emerges within self-employment through relational governance and survival imperatives. These findings challenge policy approaches that treat entrepreneurship as a stand-alone solution to refugee labor exclusion, revealing how market-based inclusion may normalize precarity instead.