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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research, this paper examines women’s migration following their husbands’ forced departure as morally obligated, gendered mobility. It shows how kinship, care, and moral economy blur distinctions between forced and voluntary migration and complicate notions of agency.

Paper long abstract

Migration is often framed as either voluntary, driven by economic aspirations, or forced, resulting from war or political violence. This panel contribution argues that such dichotomies overlook a crucial dimension of contemporary mobility: migration shaped by moral obligation and gendered expectations within kinship relations. Specifically, I focus on women’s migration following their husbands’ forced departure, a form of mobility occupying an ambiguous space between coercion and choice.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lithuania in 2022–2023, I examine how women articulate migration as a moral duty embedded in marital, familial, and religious norms. Despite diverse backgrounds, legal statuses, and degrees of religiosity, women’s roles as wives and mothers consistently structured their migration trajectories. Following a politically persecuted husband was often described not as an individual decision, but as an obligation grounded in kinship, care, and moral economy.

I argue that morally framed mobility challenges conventional distinctions between “forced” and “voluntary” migration and simplified notions of agency. While structural constraints and asylum regimes shape women’s migration, it is also actively negotiated through ethical reasoning, affective ties, and gendered responsibilities. Furthermore, the obligation not to return to the country of origin after asylum produces long-term immobility and loss, including permanent separation from extended kin and disrupted intergenerational relations.

By foregrounding moral obligation as an analytical lens, this paper highlights how gender, kinship, and morality shape experiences of mobility and immobility, and how women’s agency is enacted within, rather than outside, relational and ethical frameworks.