Producing Immobility: Compound Control and Tactical Agency Among Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon's Kafala System

Producing Immobility: Compound Control and Tactical Agency Among Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon's Kafala System This study investigates how migrant domestic workers (MDWs) experience, navigate, and resist Lebanon's kafala (sponsorship) system, which connects workers' legal residency to individual employers, creating "racialized institutional humiliation" (Fernandez, 2021) or "modern slavery" (ILO, 2020b). Despite decades of advocacy, kafala persists and MDWs remain excluded from Lebanese Labour Law protections. Through feminist and interpretive epistemologies, this qualitative study centers workers' voices via in-depth interviews with ten participants from Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, the Philippines, Madagascar, and Sri Lanka. The research investigates: (1) How do MDWs engage in employment under kafala? (2) What resistance strategies do they employ? (3) How do experiences shape their understanding of mobility, agency, and labor relations? Results showed that the kafala system is sustained through a compound immobilization framework, where several mechanisms work together simultaneously: recruitment deception, passport confiscation, physical confinement, economic exploitation, medical neglect, and control of communication. The mechanisms are constitutive, meaning that workers are not able to escape without their documents, are not able to access their confiscated documents without their employer's cooperation, are not able to demand cooperation without financial autonomy, and are not able to demand cooperation without risking deportation. Despite these limitations, workers were shown to have demonstrated tactical agency through a form of strategic resistance, which included workers’ calibrated compliance, escape planning, and building networks with embassies and digital technologies. Workers also developed an experiential jurisprudence, which is a form of theory that is informed by workers’ experiences, and this is characterized by a critique of kafala as a system that promotes ownership, as well as workers’ demands for transformative change. The research offers three theories with conceptual ideas: compound immobilization demonstrates how all these different approaches add up together to create a sense of inescapability; tactical agency emphasizes how workers find ways to act within the limitations they are confronting; and finally, experiential jurisprudence underscores workers’ own analysis as a source of legitimate knowledge. In relation to policy, the findings highlight a broad-based reform framework that is built around workers’ experiential jurisprudence, using workers-centered models and with workers alongside governments and the ILO. Keywords: kafala system; migrant domestic workers; Lebanon; immobility; compound immobilization; tactical agency; experiential jurisprudence