Structural Exclusion and Composite Vulnerability: The Ramifications of Missing Civil Documentation for Internally Displaced Women in Post-Conflict Mosul

Abstract

Life after ISIS has brought severe survival crises for internally displaced people (IDPs) and returnees as they have moved from formally managed camps to informal sites within cities. This study explores the issue of so called “legal invisibility” caused by the IDPs’ and returnees’ lack of civil and formal documents. The empirical research for this study was conducted between November 2025 and April 2026 in the city of Mosul. The study was based on a unique dual-cohort empirical research model, comprising 44 in-depth Key Informant Interviews. Through the prism of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work on intersectional vulnerability and Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Bare Life) within a State of Exception, the paper investigates a number of systematic obstacles imposed by a mechanistic and frequently rigged government institutions on IDPs and returnees seeking protection by the state. It further provides statistics that indicate that 100% of interviewed participants had been denied access to urban resources by formally authorized governorate gatekeepers; 60% were charged exorbitant brokerage fees by informal intermediaries for services that were formally free; and 85.7% were subjected to a variety of harassment by employees of governmental offices as well as security forces. A large share of IDPs are female-headed households, and the lack of documents turns their legal identity into a commodity that can be purchased for a price. This creates a lucrative market, driving IDPs and returnees into a shadow economy where they are at risk of a variety of severe exploitation, including child prostitution, sex trafficking and  temporary marriages that are conducted on an informal basis and are therefore unregistered. The children born of such relationships are, in turn, at risk of intergenerational statelessness, with 57.1% of children in the study’s Cohort B being denied access to health care and education on the basis of lacking documentation. The research proposes a novel multi-sector protection model comprising (1) peer protection and awareness raising within communities; (2) individual protection through the means of cash-for-rent and legal assistance; and (3) institutional protection through the setting up of female-led mobile documentation teams and audited, safe spaces in which marginalized, formally “paperless” citizens can be re-connected with the state’s institutional structures that deliver rights on a formal basis.