Syria: Be Exceptional, or Be Invisible

International Women’s Day is often framed as a celebration of achievements, breakthroughs, and women who have made it against the odds. But beneath this language of empowerment lies a quieter, more troubling expectation: that women must be exceptional to be seen at all.

I have lived this expectation and its violence across borders.

At the beginning of the Syrian uprising, I was a university lecturer, an activist, and a human rights defender working with international organisations. In that context, I was visible. I was invited to speak on panels, to participate in international women’s tours, to represent Syrian women’s voices particularly those from areas outside Assad regime control, often referred to as liberated areas. I was recognised as an extraordinary Syrian woman.

At the same time, Syrian women living in displacement camps surviving siege, poverty, loss and insecurity were not. Their experiences were no less political, no less shaped by violence, but they were not visible. They were not invited to speak. They were not considered representative. They did not meet the threshold of exceptionalism required to be heard.

This logic followed me into exile.

In Turkey, I was an ordinary Syrian refugee woman. I was visibly Syrian, visibly Muslim, wearing hijab. Through both observation and lived experience, I saw how Syrian women were sorted and judged. Syrian women who did not wear hijab, who fit a so-called modern aesthetic, were often met with what was framed as a compliment.

“You don’t look Syrian,” they were told.

The spoken and unspoken assumption was clear: Syrian women were imagined as hijabi, vulnerable, poor, dragging five children behind them.

The sentence was meant to flatter, but revealed something much darker.

I remember it most sharply in a public hospital in Iskenderun, where my mother was undergoing open-heart surgery. Syrian patients were treated brusquely, dismissively - as second-class citizens amid rising racism against Syrians in Turkey.

That is how we were treated, at first. Then the tone shifted. I was seen working on my MacBook, speaking English, using an iPhone: markers of class, education and global belonging. Suddenly, the treatment changed. Respect appeared.

And then came the sentence again, “You don’t look Syrian.”

That sentence stripped something bare. It revealed how humanity itself had become conditional, activated by education, language class, and proximity to whiteness. Not earned through suffering or survival, but through recognisability.

Later, in London, while studying for my master’s degree, I was once again framed as exceptional: a woman from a war zone who had made it to a prestigious scholarship and university. But outside academic and activist spaces, I was still read differently, as a hijab-wearing, racialised woman from the “third world,” navigating asylum systems, surveillance and subtle exclusions. Exceptional in one context. Ordinary and suspect in another.

One of my Syrian classmates felt compelled to remove her hijab in order to be treated with supposed normality. Even then, her racialisation did not disappear but only shifted. Meanwhile, Syrian women with lighter skin and without hijab told me they, too, had received the same supposed compliment, “You don’t look Syrian.”

Across contexts and countries, the message was consistent: dignity is not inherent. It is granted selectively.

This is the logic of exceptionalism. And it shapes not only how Syrian refugees are treated, but how Syrian women are seen, celebrated or erased.

In patriarchal societies, women are encouraged to break stereotypes, but only by becoming extraordinary. Those who do not are folded back into invisibility. This logic extends seamlessly to refugees, who are humanised when they are heroic, inspiring or useful and dehumanised when they are not.

For Syrian women, these demands collide. We are expected to survive war, displacement, loss and economic collapse and then to perform that survival in ways that are visible and admirable. Activists, founders, award-winners are celebrated. Women who endure quietly are not.

Yet it is these quieter forms of endurance that have sustained families and communities for over a decade: raising children through siege and exile, navigating aid systems and borders, absorbing grief while holding life together. These acts are rarely recognised as political because they do not flatter power. They are expected. Naturalised. Feminised.

The problem is not that exceptional Syrian women are celebrated. The problem is that exceptionalism has become the threshold for visibility.

International Women’s Day often reproduces this hierarchy. In highlighting success stories, it risks reinforcing the idea that empowerment must be visible, individual and extraordinary rather than uneven, constrained and collective. It insists that women inspire, rather than asking why the conditions of their lives remain unjust.

Syrian women do not need to be heroes to matter. They do not need to transcend impossible circumstances to deserve dignity. Survival under violence should not be treated as insufficient simply because it is ordinary.

There are so many places, lives and stories that demand deeper attention. There are so many cities shaped by war and women whose experiences resist neat narratives. But if International Women’s Day is to mean anything beyond symbolism, it must start here: by refusing a world in which humanity is conditional, and dignity must be earned through exceptional performance.

Survival is not a performance, and women should not have to prove their worth in order to be seen.

Locations Syria

Topics Women, Women's rights