Chapter Eight: Youth Migration After the Arab Spring: Single Women Migrants as Agents of Change

Following the peak of youth political engagement during the Arab uprisings, youth faced repression, polarization and social and political marginalization. As a result, some youth envisaged ways to exit. This chapter examines migration as an exit for Arab youth after the Arab Spring. Single Arab women are only a subset of the Arab migrants who fled their countries during the uprisings. Despite their increasing numbers, single women are an under-researched population (Lesch and van der Watt, 2018). There is a gap in research on the migration trajectories of single Arab women; little is known about their migration motivations and the many obstacles they have faced in their home and host countries.