This book sheds light on the complex experiences of asylum seekers and refugees in Poland, against a local backdrop of openly anti-refugee political narratives and strong opposition to sharing the ...responsibility for, and burden of, asylum seekers arriving in the EU. Through a multidimensional analysis, it highlights the processes of forced migrant admission, reception and integration in a key EU frontier country that has undergone a rapid migration status change from a transit to a host country. The book examines rich qualitative material drawn from interviews conducted with forced migrants with different legal statuses and with experts from public administration at the central and local levels, NGOs, and other institutions involved in migration governance in Poland. It discusses both opportunities for and limitations on forced migrants’ adaptation in the social, economic, and political dimensions, as well as their access to healthcare, education, the labour market, and social assistance. This book will be of particular interest to scholars, students, policymakers, and practitioners in migration and asylum studies, social policy, public policy, international relations, EU studies/European integration, law, economics, and sociology.
The scholarship on race and racism has tended to focus mostly on countries in Western Europe. It has thereby overlooked racial dynamics taking place in other regions - including Central and Eastern ...Europe (CEE). This article examines the reverberations of the recent global antiracist mobilisation triggered by the killing of George Floyd in the United States in this underexplored context. Specifically, it considers the significance of the 'Black Lives Matter' (BLM) movement for Black people in Poland. Championed by the BLM movement, there have been demands for further reflection on racial inequalities in European societies, where many citizens in Europe's West are beginning to engage with the impact of colonialism. The effect of George Floyd's death has also reached unexpected places such as Poland, where Black communities have renewed their calls to reshape their representation in public discourse. We trace these mobilisations via our analysis of an online video discussion that unfolded under the hashtag #DontCallMeMurzyn. This article makes a case for the significance of concepts such as race and racism to our understanding of social relations in Poland; it shows, furthermore, how the BLM mobilisation has revived conversations about everyday racism and the representation of Black people in the public sphere.
The politicization of the increased influx of migrants to Europe in recent years, as well as Islamist terrorist attacks carried out in European cities, have led to a situation in which anti-Muslim ...sentiments have reached unprecedented levels. It is not only those European countries directly affected by the growth of the Muslim population that register increased generalized negative feelings towards that population, but also those that are home to very small and partially autochthonous Muslim populations, like Poland, which has not served as a transit point or a destination for the increased number of people arriving from Syria and elsewhere to claim asylum in Europe. Pędziwiatr's article explores the ambiguity of attitudes in the Polish Catholic Church towards Muslims and Islam in these new circumstances. It examines both the Church's official statements and the opinions of students in Catholic seminaries, which diverge significantly. When the positions of some of these present and future priests are communicated to the public, they contribute to a strengthening of hegemonic representations of Muslims as Others, rather than a deconstruction of them.
In spite of numerous studies exploring the attitudes of Polish society towards followers of Islam including Arabsor studies showing how Polish media shapes the image of Muslims and Islam, there are ...hardly any analysesassessing how these attitudes and images are perceived by the minority group. The purpose of this text is tofill this gap and analyse the perception of transformation of attitudes in contemporary Polish society towardsArabs from the perspective of members of the Arab and Muslim communities. The article’s analytical framework builds upon the conceptions problematizing a group sense of alienation and familiarity in the context ofhuman mobility and immobility. In particular, the text shows the usefulness of the concept of otherness andstrangeness developed by Ewa Nowicka in the late 1990s for the analysis of the transformation of attitudestowards Arabs and Muslims in Polish society in the last two decades
The increasing participation of faith leaders in environmental debates has led to the renewed interest in the 'greening of religions'. This paper examines the frames employed by religious actors to ...encourage environmental action, with a focus on the eco-movement within the Roman Catholic Church in Poland. Its narratives are connected to the goals of promoting 'ecological conversion' and encouraging change at the community level. We demonstrate how pro-environmental religious actors navigate between anti-ecological voices within the Church and left-wing activism, applying the following frames: 1) presenting ecological lifestyle as a religious obligation, 2) promoting the idea of 'integral ecology,' rooted in a Christian anthropology, 3) reinterpreting Catholicism by showing green practices as a legitimized element of the Church's tradition. We argue that these activities constitute a form of a counterculture that develops a values-based approach to environmentalism, aiming to transform the culture of the Catholic church and society.
Almost eight million Ukrainians have fled their country to escape the Russian full-scale invasion. To provide empirical evidence on how beneficiaries of temporary protection who reside in the ...immediate proximity of Ukraine differ from those who went further and reside in Western European countries, two large-scale rapid-response surveys were conducted in Kraków, Poland, and Vienna, Austria, in spring 2022. Data include information on socio-demographic characteristics, human capital, and return intentions of 472 and 1,094 adult Ukrainian refugees in Poland and Austria, respectively. Contributing to the growing empirical evidence on consistent assortative patterns in refugee inflows into Europe, our findings show that regularities in patterns of self-selection also occur in forced migration contexts where legal routes to safety apply. According to the analysed convenience sample, a tentative conclusion is that the further Ukrainian refugees moved to the West, the more self-selected they tend to be in the key dimensions of formal educational attainment, previous employment, language skills, and urbanity. Results indicate that willingness to stay in Kraków is significantly lower than willingness to remain in Vienna. This suggests that public financial support and living conditions, rather than diaspora networks, are decisive factors in shaping the decision to stay, move to another location or return to Ukraine. The aim to start a new life elsewhere may drive the motivation to choose a more distant destination instead of a neighboring country that allows to return rather quickly. Host countries should be aware of these specific characteristics of their refugee populations and adapt their integration policies accordingly.
Although significant scholarly attention has been devoted to the study of mosque conflicts in Europe, up until now most of it has focussed on Western European countries. This has left a significant ...gap to be filled in the study of mosque tensions in Central and Eastern Europe, where scholarship is scant yet where tensions over constructions of mosques are not less intensive than in the West. Drawing on two recent case studies of mosque constructions in Poland, we argue that a significant shift has taken place in the ways that mosques are perceived, unveiling unprecedented opposition towards their construction. From being largely unproblematic before the Second World War and during the Communist era, mosques have become subjects of fierce public debate. We draw parallels to how anti-mosque arguments raised in Poland fit into a larger European meta-narrative on mosques and Muslims, yet our aim is to situate the paper historically to argue that Polish mosque conflicts must be contextualised within Poland's unique historical encounter with Islam in order to more accurately make sense of its creeping Islamophobia.
Sexual politics play a key role in anti-Muslim narratives. This has been observed by scholarship problematising liberal feminist approaches towards 'non-Western' subjects focusing on countries such ...as France, the USA and the Netherlands. Yet interrogations into how these debates play out in European national contexts that are located outside of the European 'West' have attracted significantly less scholarly attention. Drawing on qualitative data collected in Poland this article aims to begin to fill this gap by analysing the centrality of feminist discourses within Islamophobic agendas in Poland. The article asks how discourses around women's rights are mobilised simultaneously, and paradoxically, by both secular and Catholic groups in 'post-communist' Poland. By showcasing how feminist sentiments are employed by ideologically opposing groups, we sketch out some of the complexities in the ways Islamophobia operates in a Central and Eastern European context.
This article seeks to address the intersection of migration and religion/religious affiliation of migrants in Central Europe. Increase in immigration from Ukraine to Poland observed since around 2015 ...has been challenging and remodeling religious relations in the relatively homogeneous country. Drawing on the qualitative research conducted in 2020 in Krakow, one of the key Polish destinations for the migrants, this article explores the strategies and choices of immigrants in relation to the religious market, and consequences of their decisions. Our research, embedded in the theoretical perspective of the economics of religion, shows the fluidity of religiosity in migration processes as well as inconsistencies in religious affiliations in the context of migration. We propose a concept of non-religious incentive for participation/church affiliation and argue that identified inconsistencies stem largely from the non-religious motivations related to the attractiveness of the goods and services offered by some religious communities.
Aim. This study contributes to research on new immigrant destinations in CEE by investigating the neighbourhood concentration of immigrants in Poland. We focus on Kraków – the second largest city – ...for which we have built a unique register-based dataset containing geocoded individual level data. To our knowledge, it is the first high-quality dataset of this type, prepared and used for research purposes in Poland. We use it to describe immigrants’ spatial allocation at a relatively early stage of immigration using the kNN approach.
Results and conclusions. We find that whereas foreigners compose around 4.2% of city population, 50% of the city inhabitants live in the 200 kNNs with a share of foreigners below 2.2%. The DI for the immigrants is 0.45. Yet, a relatively high concentration could be seen among foreigners from Asia and America. However, immigrants from Ukraine and other Eastern European, non-EU countries are much more evenly spread around the city.
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