Paper short abstract:

While many important studies are exploring the impacts of migration on displaced people, this paper asks an equally important question: what happens to those who are left behind? This paper explores the gendered experience of reconstructing communities where men have become absent and its consequences for development practice.

Paper long abstract:

Demographic change is an important driver of social and political change throughout the world. Mass migration due to political or environmental instability continues to displace power within both macro and micro structures of society. More recently, we have seen the significance of these changes throughout the African continent. While many important studies explore the impacts of migration on emigrant and displaced people, this paper seeks to understand what happens to those who are left behind. Demographic change has historically been an important political phenomenon, political demography itself has largely been undervalued in political science. What is especially lacking in this discussion, however, is attention to how demographic changes can be gendered. Furthermore, it is critical to understand why these gendered changes are important for the stability and instability of political norms, expressions of power, notions of participation, and social equity as society adapts to demographic changes. This paper seeks to fill this void in the literature by investigating the political importance of gendered demographic change in rural communities in the Abda region of Morocco and Nyanza province, Kenya. These comparative case studies demonstrate that gendered demographic changes have important implications for what it means to participate socially, economically, and politically in village communities. Where power vacuums are created, new leaders emerge and new ways of engaging within social spaces are experimented with and adopted. The gendered ways in which these adaptations occur have important implications for sustainable development and social change in communities where men are becoming increasingly absent.