This edited volume fills a gap in current research on asylum seekers and refugees. By focusing on two East Asian countries, Japan and Taiwan, this volume offers material for comparison and reflection ...on an area of the world in which this theme is still relatively underdeveloped. By approaching the theme through the different perspectives of human rights, social construction through media representation and public opinion, and lived experiences, the book offers a multifaceted and sophisticated analysis of the phenomenon. The main aim of this collection is to expand current scholarship on refugee studies and offer policy recommendations on the timely topic of refugee and asylum seekers in East Asia. This is an open access book.
Asylum has become a highly charged political issue across developed countries, raising a host of difficult ethical and political questions. What responsibilities do the world's richest countries have ...to refugees arriving at their borders? Are states justified in implementing measures to prevent the arrival of economic migrants if they also block entry for refugees? Is it legitimate to curtail the rights of asylum seekers to maximize the number of refugees receiving protection overall? This book draws upon political and ethical theory and an examination of the experiences of the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia to consider how to respond to the challenges of asylum. In addition to explaining why asylum has emerged as such a key political issue in recent years, it provides a compelling account of how states could move towards implementing morally defensible responses to refugees.
How do communities find protection in chaotic political economic settings? This book endeavors to show how normal people placed in extraordinarily difficult conditions created protections for their ...assets and buffered against outsider predation through property rights. The research project focuses on Palestinians living in seven refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan. Using interviews with 200 Palestinian refugees, legal title documents, memoirs, and United Nations Relief Works Agency archives the author traces the evolution of property rights from informal understandings of ownership to formal legal claims of assets and resources to shed light on how communities thrive in challenging political economic spaces. Initially, Palestinians deployed bits and pieces of their pre-refugee life to craft property rights that met the challenges of living in refugee camps. Later, as the camps increased in complexity with expanding markets and new outsiders entering the political fray, then Palestinians strategically melded their informal institutional practices with the formal rules of political outsiders. Palestinian refugees, to varying degrees of success, managed to protect their assets and community from predation and state incorporation.
"No Path Homeis an extremely interesting, engaging, and well-written book. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn's fluid and clear prose paints a very evocative picture of life for internally displaced persons as ...well as presenting a clear theoretical account."-Laura Hammond, SOAS University of London, author ofThis Place Will Become Home
For more than 60 million displaced people around the world, humanitarian aid has become a chronic condition.No Path Homedescribes its symptoms in detail. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value, preserve bodily integrity, and engage in meaningful daily practice have been blown apart.After the Georgian war with Russia in 2008, Dunn spent sixteen months immersed in the everyday lives of the 28,000 people placed in thirty-six resettlement camps by official and nongovernmental organizations acting in concert with the Georgian government. She reached the conclusion that the humanitarian condition poses a survival problem that is not only biological but also existential. InNo Path Home, she paints a moving picture of the ways in which humanitarianism leaves displaced people in limbo, neither in a state of emergency nor able to act as normal citizens in the country where they reside.
The literature on refugees’ experiences has been enriched in recent years as we witnessed a refugees’ crisis that has not been seen since WWII. Only the Syrian civil war displaced more than five ...million civilians, while, according to an UNCHR report published in June 2018, wars, violence and persecution uprooted a record number of 16.2 million people across the world in 2017. The book briefly reviewed here, Violent Borders. Refugees and the Right to Move, investigates the tumultuous times we live in, ones in which millions of people leave their homes in search of better opportunities, exposing themselves to dangers, encountering violence to the borders and new walls rising in their way. The author argues that building walls and securing borders does not stop migration, but makes it more dangerous: “…borders continue to kill. Even with the massive amount of attention paid to the issue and the vast funds expended to stop migration, people continue to move in 2016 and the year shattered the record of the number of border deaths, with over 7800 people losing their lives simply trying to go from one place to another”.
Some sixty-five years after 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland, the popular conception of Palestinian refugees still emphasizes their fierce commitment to exercising their ..."right of return." Exile has come to seem a kind of historical amber, preserving refugees in a way of life that ended abruptly with "the catastrophe" of 1948 and their camps—inhabited now for four generations—as mere zones of waiting. While reducing refugees to symbols of steadfast single-mindedness has been politically expedient to both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict it comes at a tremendous cost for refugees themselves, overlooking their individual memories and aspirations and obscuring their collective culture in exile. Refugees of the Revolution is an evocative and provocative examination of everyday life in Shatila, a refugee camp in Beirut. Challenging common assumptions about Palestinian identity and nationalist politics, Diana Allan provides an immersive account of camp experience, of communal and economic life as well as inner lives, tracking how residents relate across generations, cope with poverty and marginalization, and plan––pragmatically and speculatively—for the future. She gives unprecedented attention to credit associations, debt relations, electricity bartering, emigration networks, and NGO provisions, arguing that a distinct Palestinian identity is being forged in the crucible of local pressures.What would it mean for the generations born in exile to return to a place they never left? Allan addresses this question by rethinking the relationship between home and homeland. In so doing, she reveals how refugees are themselves pushing back against identities rooted in a purely nationalist discourse. This groundbreaking book offers a richly nuanced account of Palestinian exile, and presents new possibilities for the future of the community.
In recent years, the refugee crisis has emerged as a major global challenge with social, economic, and political implications. Figures indicate that there are currently over 22 million refugees ...around the world. While refugees are usually regarded as a burden for their host countries, their entrepreneurial ventures might offer significant contributions to local economies. Although refugee entrepreneurship has become significantly evident in several economies, theoretical and empirical research tackling this issue is still scant. This study aims to explore the characteristics of and challenges faced by refugee tourism and hospitality entrepreneurs in Istanbul, Turkey. Drawing on qualitative data collected through 20 semi-structured interviews with refugee tourism and hospitality entrepreneurs, the findings suggest that refugee entrepreneurs were challenged by four key issues; legislative and administrative, financial, socio-cultural and market-related obstacles. The study also offers insights into characteristics of refugee tourism and hospitality entrepreneurs and their integration into their host communities.
Increased academic attention to the intersections of refugee studies and gender studies has focused on the lives and trajectories of refugee women. In this study, we examine resettlement institutions ...involved with refugee women, drawing upon critical scholarship on “brokerage.” Brokers reproduce and impose the powers of the state, but also negotiate with and resist the state. We draw from interviews with resettlement workers and refugee leaders in refugee‐serving institutions, focusing on one mid‐sized metropolitan area in the United States. We argue that resettlement institutions enact brokering not only in the cultural domain but also the legal domain. We further posit that cultural–legal brokering is enacted via contested negotiation of idealized patriarchal values–traditions in both the countries of origin and resettlement.
