AbstractBy 2019, a record high of 79.5 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, and human rights violations (UNHCR 2020a: 2). In the decade leading up to this only a fraction of this number were able to ‘return’ or find a ‘durable solution’. Multiple waves of displacement are common, and ‘return’ often involves far more complicated arrangements

The concept of benefit-sharing has popular focus in numerous discussions concerning approaches with displacement, development, and sustainable livelihood. It is clear that compensation is inadequate to mitigate impoverishment risks and re-build improved sustainable livelihoods. Benefit-sharing is seen to be a vital option for the improvement and development of re-settler’s livelihoods. Subsequently

Scholarship prompted by 40 years of mass repatriations has highlighted that repatriations and returns are shaped by social navigation and renegotiation of ‘home’. This article argues that the original experience of displacement itself, and the interconnected social rupture or continuity, moderates this negotiation and has consequences for social distinction, class reproduction, and political emplacement

Since the end of the 2006 post-war transition, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the international community have struggled to design, finance and implement a host of national and regional disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programmes. The weak capacity of implementing institutions, widespread corruption, funding gaps, Western-driven processes and a misdiagnosis of local needs

This article investigates the pragmatic, everyday journeys of South Sudanese refugees in northern Uganda’s Palabek Refugee Settlement through a mobilities-focused analytical lens. Despite the repatriation of vast numbers of refugees, little is known about the diversity of refugees’ later movements. Recognition of this complexity is important. Although many of our South Sudanese interlocutors take part

The global COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns and restrictions have had uneven impacts on populations and have deepened many pre-existing inequalities along lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender. Refugees have been shown to be particularly negatively impacted in many countries, with existing structures of violence and insecurity worsened by the immediate consequences of the pandemic through

Over the past 20 years both Israel and Germany have become destination countries for unaccompanied minors (UM), albeit at different speeds and scales and in contrasting geopolitical settings. This article compares the reception and integration of UM in the two countries with a particular focus on their access to education and employment. The movement of UM over borders goes hand in hand with the drawing

This research contributes to the development of migration theories by examining the challenges and opportunities faced by UK-resident migrants from North Korea in maintaining transnational family ties. Particularly, it reflects critically on the role played by ‘place’ as a regulatory apparatus in shaping the migrants’ experiences of family relationships in a transnational social space. The findings

Underemployment (i.e. a skilled worker in a low-skill job) has a negative impact on life satisfaction, and college-educated refugees often experience underemployment in the countries where they are resettled. Using interviews, this small-scale study explores college-educated Iraqi refugees’ experiences of employment in the US, and how employment experiences impact their resettlement and life satisfaction

Although the refugee phenomenon is not new and refugee camps are rarely temporary, in most cases, the procedures implemented within refugee camps have failed to apply principles of sustainability to ensure refugees’ dignity and improve their quality of life, thereby helping them become independent and self-reliant. This improvement, in turn, may help them return to their homes in the future or may

Understanding the unique health and behavioral health needs of refugees is critical to developing culturally sensitive interventions and services for this vulnerable population. This paper highlights the process of recruiting participants for a study exploring these needs for resettled refugee women from their own perspectives and the perspectives of resettlement service providers. We recruited 14

Statistics made available by the Swedish Migration Agency (SMA) make it possible to follow first-decision outcomes in asylum cases concerning unaccompanied children (types of residence permits granted, percentage of rejections, etc.). Yet, we know little about differences in asylum decision outcomes for unaccompanied children coming to Sweden. Therefore, we wanted to find out how gender, country of

Visual representations of refugees likely have a determinative function in the ways policies are written and aid is dispensed for crises resolution efforts. We use theoretical concepts from the visual framing literature and two studies—a content analysis and an experiment—to examine the effects of six visual frames. We study the content of newspapers from four countries for the following visual frames:

Immediately after newly inaugurated President Trump issued Executive Order 13769 in 2017, commonly referred to as the ‘Muslim ban’, people around the world engaged in widespread resistance in a variety of ways, including through a relatively new forum: social media. While scholars have examined counterframing and symbolic boundary-work in resistance movements, little is known about impact social media

In 2018, Northern Ireland (NI) government officials, journalists, and preliminary research declared that NI citizens had provided a ‘welcoming society’ to Syrian refugees settling in local communities across the country. However, this claim starkly contrasted with other reports of growing violence towards foreign-born groups, particularly Muslims, which lead to NI being identified as the ‘Race Hate

Using Portes’ critique of research that ‘samples on the dependent variable’, this article identifies three particularly widespread and inter-related examples of this tendency within research on displacement, and particularly within the growing field of literature on refugee self-reliance. The first concerns the tendency to sample those in possession of particular labels; the second to sample those

More than 26 million people are recognized globally as refugees and have been forced to flee from their home countries because of poverty, human rights violations, natural disasters, climate change, and other social and political conflicts. What is more, most host communities are usually poor and face social and economic crises. This is why supporting integration between refugees and host communities

This article focuses on the changes in masculinity identity caused by forced migration and remasculinization strategies developed by men against this situation. This qualitative study sets out the idea that forced migration causes the dramatic changes in gender roles, especially in the identity of masculinity. In this context, data were collected from 15 male refugees who flee from different countries

How do host states attempt to speed up returns of refugees before peacebuilding and the lack of official arrangements with the home state? Building on the conceptual framework, which coalesces governing practices, strategic narratives, and issue linkages, the article explains the early stages of policy formulation and discourses on refugee returns. Empirically, it draws from Turkey’s return initiatives

The Syrian crisis has resulted in a devastating impact on refugees’ oral health and data on their oral health is lacking. To explore oral health and dental needs of Syrian refugee children, a cross-sectional study of 484 children was conducted. Caries prevalence, DMFT, SiC, and oral hygiene indices were recorded. Caries prevalence was 96.1%, with mean dmft/DMFT scores of 3.65/1.15, SiC scores were

The impacts of protracted displacement can be understood through the spatial and material afterlives of war. In the context of Northern Uganda, the experiences of conflict that are interpreted in memorialisation are often reflected of how governments and aid agencies administered life during war. This article examines leftover aid rations, archives, former displacement camp sites and even unmarked

In the study of migrants and violence, the focus is often on the likely opportunities and motives of migrants to commit violence, and the effect of this on the level of crime. This article reconstructs the causal path differently. It considers the variation of the number of refugees as a logical proxy of a humane culture and studies the variation in the occurrence of homicides as causally conditioned

The health and economic consequences of Covid-19 have not affected the different groups in society equally, particularly the weakest communities, chief among them asylum seekers who have been hit the hardest. This study focuses on the Israeli media’s role during this crisis, and whether they have advocated or hindered African asylum seekers capability ‘to be secure’. This capability is the most important

In the interdisciplinary volume, Resolving Displacement and Building Peace: Beyond Beneficiaries, editors Megan Bradley, James Milner and Blair Peruniak call for analysis of refugee perspectives and ‘strategies utilized by people confronted with what appear to be impossible choices’. They note that international organizations increasingly and routinely seek to involve refugees and IDPs in peacebuilding

Return Migration and Nation-Building in Africa: Reframing the Somali Diaspora.Routledge, 2018. 194 pp. 8 B/W Illustrations, £120. ISBN 9781138590113

This article discusses the social mobility of combatants and introduces the notion of circular return to explain their pendular state of movement between civilian and combatant life. This phenomenon is widely observed in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where Congolese youth have been going in and out of armed groups for several decades now. While the notion of circular return has its origins

The processual nature of affinal relationships is well established in Africanist anthropology. This article calls for greater attention to spatial considerations and proposes the concept of movement as an integral dimension of understanding affinal relationships. This observation springs from reflections on how the experiences of displacement and return in northern Uganda have reshaped constructions

At Europe’s Edge: Migration and the Crisis in the Mediterranean. Edited by MainwaringCetta. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 240pp. €73.55 EUR. ISBN 9780198842514

Bordering. By Yuval-DavisN., WemyssG. and CassidyK. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. 240pp. £17.99. ISBN 978-1-5095-0495-4

Focused on London, this article looks at the ideology and practice of Congolese nationalism in exile, and at the ideas of home, belonging and return connected with this. Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) migrants came to Western Europe escaping violence and economic and political collapse but, for a long time, the imaginative concentration of the diaspora was not on politics, but on a consumer-based

We studied the acculturation processes of Syrian refugees in the Netherlands, based on semi-structured in-depth interviews. The study aims to investigate how Syrian refugees perceive the cultural distance caused by the differences and boundaries between Syrian and Dutch culture; how they cope with the boundaries and prejudice that they perceive; and which acculturation orientations they prefer. The

Journeys from the Abyss: The Holocaust and Forced Migration from the 1880s to the Present. By KushnerTony. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. xii + 348 pp. £24.95. ISBN 978 1 78694 063 6

The increasing use of social media and mobile devices by asylum seekers offers new vetting opportunities for immigration authorities, to verify the identity or to assess national-security or 1F-exclusion aspects. Based on interviews with practitioners in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, the first experiences with both of these new methods seem to be mixed, while formal evaluations

Recent research has pointed to the increasing impact of digitally derived data on forced migration processes, including legal mechanisms for accessing social media profiles of asylum seekers. These developments raise the issue of data privacy, specifically how asylum seekers understand data privacy and protect their data. This article pays particular attention to cultural variants of data privacy.

In northern Uganda, more than 50,000 people were recruited by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) between the late 1980s and 2004, mostly by force. Around half of those taken were children (under 18 years old). A large number were never seen by their families again, but more than 20,000 returned through aid-financed reception centres. Endeavours were made to reunite them with their relatives, who were

The literature on Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) returnees in Acholiland, northern Uganda tells us that those who returned from the rebel group are likely to experience stigma and social exclusion. While the term is deployed frequently, ‘stigma’ is not a well-developed concept and most of the evidence we have comes from accounts of returnees themselves. Focusing instead on the ‘stigmatizers’, this article

This article focuses on Syrian-refugee self-reliance and humanitarian efforts meant to foster it in Halba, northern Lebanon. I argue that humanitarian livelihood programming is ‘neo-cosmetic’, as the skills refugees acquire through humanitarian programmes turn out to be little more than a cosmetic accessory. While the humanitarian apparatus deliberately limits its action in order not to challenge host

The present study conducted in the Netherlands examines citizen's attitudes towards asylum seekers. We collected data in a large (N = 993) heterogeneous adult sample in November 2015, in the midst of the European “refugee crisis”. Our first aim was to map the reactions of citizens towards asylum seekers. Our second aim was to examine the role of right-wing ideological attitudes (i.e., Right-Wing Authoritarianism

The complexity and duration of the so-called ‘European refugee crisis’ created a climate of uncertainty, which left ample room for mass media to shape citizens’ understanding of what the arrival of these refugees meant for their respective country. This study analyses the national media discourses in Hungary, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Spain for this time period. Applying Latent Dirichlet

Forced migration and displacement are often associated with increased exposure to various risks which negatively affect personal safety. While experiences of displaced populations are heterogeneous, women have been shown to be exposed to intersecting factors, such as vulnerability to gender-based violence, restricting cultural norms, and discrimination. Being a mother or at least responsible for the

The high number of asylum seekers in Sweden has highlighted the need for structured assessment tools to screen for refugee mental health problems in clinical services. We examined the utility of th ...

Immunological defence against pathogens and behavioural responses to members of other ethnic or racial groups may be understood as co-evolved solutions to a commonly recurring adaptive problem in o ...

This article provides a theoretical review of higher-education (HE) access for refugees in humanitarian situations. Drawing upon the case of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, we discuss challenges and opportunities around developing new HE modalities to enhance its role in the humanitarian response as well as reconfiguring refugees’ ‘unknowable future’. We also examine opportunities for HE access and the

Although the resettlement of refugees is always politically contentious in host countries, the current global refugee crisis has only magnified those contentions. In the United States and in many European countries there has been a strong backlash against the resettlement of refugees particularly those from Muslim majority countries. However, within countries such as the U.S. there are areas of the

The Indicators of Integration framework—a conceptual framework defining core domains of refugee integration—has had a significant impact on the discourse surrounding refugee integration and a major role in shaping policy, practice and academic debate. Drawing on an innovative participatory mapping approach, this study examined the social connections of isolated single refugee men from Iran and Afghanistan

Social workers are confronted with a contradictory task: that of acting as state parents for unaccompanied asylum seeking children, in an era of hostile migration policies and austerity. Mobilizing Young’s (2006) concept of ‘responsibility’ we ask: how is state parental responsibility towards unaccompanied minors given meaning, and with what consequences, for both frontline workers and unaccompanied

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of existing psychological interventions on the social adjustment of young refugees. From 51 peer-reviewed articles identified in the literature, 11 studies with 25 therapeutic effect sizes met criteria for inclusion (N = 1,736). Hedges’ g was used to measure effect sizes and a random-effects model was conducted. The number of sessions and

The research presented here is based on a large-scale, multi-methods study of refugees who have been resettled to the United Kingdom. We analyse quantitative data on language proficiency four or more years after resettlement to identify the key characteristics of those who are most likely to have low language proficiency and to be at risk of long-term dependency and exclusion. Qualitative interviews

Tato studie zkouma vznaseni požadavků o tzv. uprchlicke krizi ve veřejne sfeře ve třech zemich: Rakousku, Ceske republice a Slovensku. Pta se, kdo formoval diskurz o krizi v narodnich veřejných sferach, jakou podobu diskurz mněl a do jake miry se vznikl spolecný evropský diskurz.

We study determinants of happiness, a subjective measure of wellbeing, for roughly 600 refugees from over 30 different countries currently residing in Utica, New York. For refugees from the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and Southeast Asia, having many friends from one’s own ethnic group is strongly positively correlated with happiness in Utica, while for African refugees, English language

One of the defining features of the crisis in the Central African Republic (CAR) since 2013 has been massive displacement. Currently, about a quarter of the country’s population is displaced. People who have been forcibly displaced, whether internally or abroad, and people who stayed behind this time (but frequently have their own memories of displacement) provide particular kinds of information about

With more than 60 million people across the world displaced from their homes, the refugee crisis has been in the political limelight and prominent in academic conversations. This research probed beyond refugees’ distressed psychological wellbeing by exploring contributory factors to refugees’ effective resettlement during the post-migration phase. Adopting a psychological lens, the paper critically

About 450,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon today. With the arrival of over one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon since the Syrian civil war started in 2011, Palestinians were no longer the ...

Many of the refugees who have recently arrived in Denmark and other European countries are young people. In order to support refugee youth, it is important to understand how institutions and initiatives in the receiving countries may best facilitate their social inclusion. Drawing on the concept of social capital, this article explores school practices supporting refugees through a qualitative case

The high number of asylum seekers in Sweden has highlighted the need to develop and evaluate structured assessment tools for children. In this study, we aimed to explore the utility of the Strength ...

Drawing on unique sources from the Swedish Migration Agency Archive, this article examines how Afghan asylum seekers and refugees fared in their encounter with Swedish internal and external controls of people seeking protection from persecution during the Cold War. Within a theoretical framework that draws on the concept of statist logic, the history of refugeehood, interactionist sociology and critical

Grounded in the moral responsibility to help those who seek assistance and refuge, humanitarian-aid organizations occupy a central place in our contemporary social life. The question arises as to whether the humanitarian response can provide solutions for those exiled by political persecution. In interdisciplinary work in political philosophy and ethnography, I examine the experiences of politically

AbstractThe effect of the mismatch between the numbers of forced migrants that host governments are prepared to deal with and the actual number of those seeking refuge is that many forced migrants must find what I term ‘reluctant’ refuge—precarious, unofficial shelter. In this article, I first theorize ‘reluctance’, before introducing the concept of archaeology of the contemporary world in order to

While living migrants are the object of enormous attention, counted and screened on arrival and throughout their presence in European states, those who die crossing the Mediterranean remain uncounted and largely unidentified, as a result of a failure of European states to collect data from both bodies and from families looking for missing loved ones. Living migrants are seen as objects of interest

This article focuses on the restrictive European asylum policies and on their humanitarian consequences in Southeastern Europe. We discuss two interrelated topics: (i) the dynamic of the migration of asylum seekers to Europe and (ii) the specific position of Southeastern European countries and the situation of stranded migrants in the region. We identify central elements in the European asylum system