Results by title

145 books match the query 'Refugees' and 12 start with s

Sort by

Safe Third Countries

Extending the EU Asylum and Immigration Policies to Central and Eastern Europe

Sandra Lavenex

Central European University Press, 1999

The refugee issue has always been controversial and Lavenex's analyses add fuel to an already heated debate. She analyses the various bi- and multilateral processes by which the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEECs) are being gradually incorporated into a restrictive refugee regime established among the EU member states, in which the CEECs serve as "gate-keepers" for refugees and immigrants heading towards Western Europe.

At a time when many transition countries are trying to enter the EU, Lavenex highlights the CEECs consent to adapt to Western European policies aimed at fighting illegal immigration and reducing the numbers of asylum seekers as a political bargaining tool in exchange for future membership in the EU. She also argues that the regime undermines the values of international refugee protection and diffuses states' responsibilities by establishing a system of negative redistribution for the handling of asylum claims.

Safe Third Countries is the first comprehensive study on the extension of the emergent European refugee regime and highlights, in an innovative manner, the complex entanglement of domestic policies, European integration and international relations.

[more]

Schooling for Refugee Children

A Social Justice Perspective Informed by Children from Syria

Eleanore Hargreaves, Brian Lally, Bassel Akar, Jumana Al-Waeli, and Jasmine Costello

University College London, 2024

A unique representation of refugee children’s journeys in their own voices, reflected through their stories, verses, and artworks.

Schooling for Refugee Children is a collaboration between five authors who explore their interactions with refugee children displaced from Syria to the Lebanese borders and London. Through a program of carefully tailored research activities, the authors analyze the children’s representations of their journeys and current circumstances, particularly focusing on questions of ongoing schooling in the face of displacement. The children’s experiences are expressed through their own words and drawings, disrupting the stereotype of children as receivers rather than empowered actors, and challenging traditional solutions for improving schooling. Throughout, the children are eloquent about their schooling in the context of displacement. Their views and illustrations depict a keen awareness of social justice issues, including the distribution of wealth, recognition of status, and representation of voice. In this way, the book brings to light important representations of some empowering experiences lived through by refugee children from Syria, as well as their thoughts on what has helped their learning and what can be done better. The children’s need for care and a sense of belonging in their schools and their new communities is given particular emphasis throughout the book, represented by one child, who simply requested, “Add some more love!”

Schooling for Refugee Children is invaluable for educators, policymakers, and anyone interested in refugee education and social justice. By centering the voices of refugee children, the book sheds light on their unique perspectives and needs, challenging conventional approaches to improving schooling for displaced populations.

[more]

Shelter on the Journey

Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and Migration

Priscilla Solano

Temple University Press, 2024

Migration journeys are arduous, with migrants tormented by risk, abuse, threats, and xenophobia. Shelters, staffed by humanitarian workers and volunteers, provide safe spaces for those in transit. Shelter on the Journey examines how these sites, often faith-based civil society associations, create solidarity and help politicize migrants, giving them a sense of themselves as an empowered, rights-holding people.

Solano, who volunteered at shelters in Mexico, chronicles the activity in three of the nearly 100 shelters along a unique humanitarian trail that many Central Americans take to reach the United States. She outlines the constraints faced by these sites and their potential to create social transformation and considers how and why migration security is currently framed and managed as both a criminal and humanitarian issue.

Shelter on the Journey explores the politics of the shelters, their social world, and the dynamics of charity and solidarity, as well as the need for humanitarian assistance and advocacy for dignified and free transit migration.

[more]

Standing in the Need

Culture, Comfort, and Coming Home After Katrina

By Katherine E. Browne

University of Texas Press, 2015

Standing in the Need presents an intimate account of an African American family’s ordeal after Hurricane Katrina. Before the storm struck, this family of one hundred fifty members lived in the bayou communities of St. Bernard Parish just outside New Orleans. Rooted there like the wild red iris of the coastal wetlands, the family had gathered for generations to cook and share homemade seafood meals, savor conversation, and refresh their interconnected lives.

In this lively narrative, Katherine Browne weaves together voices and experiences from eight years of post-Katrina research. Her story documents the heartbreaking struggles to remake life after everyone in the family faced ruin. Cast against a recovery landscape managed by outsiders, the efforts of family members to help themselves could get no traction; outsiders undermined any sense of their control over the process. In the end, the insights of the story offer hope. Written for a broad audience and supported by an array of photographs and graphics, Standing in the Need offers readers an inside view of life at its most vulnerable.

[more]

States And Strangers

Refugees And Displacements Of Statecraft

Nevzat Soguk

University of Minnesota Press, 1999

Looks at the role of refugees in international relations.

Refugees may flee their country, but can they escape the confining, defining logic of all the voices that speak for them? As refugees multiply in our troubled world, more and more scholars, studies, and pundits focus on their plight. Most of these analyses, says Nevzat Soguk, start from a model that shares the assumptions manifested in traditional definitions of citizen, nation, and state. Within this hierarchy, he argues, a refugee has no place to go. States and Strangers questions this paradigm, particularly its vision of the territoriality of life.

A radical retheorization of the refugee from a Foucauldian perspective, the book views the international refugee regime not as a simple tertiary response, arising from the practice of states regarding refugee problems, but as itself an aspect of the regimentation of statecraft. The attendant discourse negates the multiplicity of refugee events and experience; by assigning the refugee an identity-someone without the citizen’s grounding within a territorial space-the state renders him voiceless and deprives him of representation and protection. States and Strangers asks how this happens and how it can be avoided.Using historical, archival research and interpretive strategies drawn from a genealogical approach, Soguk considers the role of the refugee in the emergence and maintenance of the sovereign territorial state from the late seventeenth century to contemporary times. ISBN 0-8166-3166-2 Cloth/jacket £00.00 $62.95x340 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 MarchBorderlines Series, volume 11Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

[more]

Steel Helmet and Mortarboard

An Academic in Uncle Sam's Army

Francis H. Heller

University of Missouri Press, 2009

As a young officer candidate in the Austrian army in 1938, Francis Heller put himself at risk by refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. Had he stayed in Vienna, he would have been arrested by the Gestapo as a supporter of Austrian independence and an enemy of the Nazis. But he managed to escape into Czechoslovakia under cover of darkness. He subsequently made his way to America, where he finally pursued the academic career that military service had interrupted.

Steel Helmet and Mortarboard is the story of this Austrian refugee who earned an American law degree in 1941 and set his sights on studying political science but a year later was drafted into the U.S. Army. In his second military career, Heller opted for service as an enlisted man in a combat unit. After basic training, he was assigned as a private in a regular army division. Then in a field artillery unit, he so distinguished himself in combat in the Pacific theater that he received a battlefield commission and went on to serve in the early months of the occupation of Japan—and on one assignment, escorting German nationals home from the Far East, found himself back in Europe and witnessing evidence of the horrors at Dachau that he himself had barely managed to escape.

Heller’s account of those years recalls how an upper-middle-class émigré adjusted to military life while serving in such combat zones as New Guinea and the Philippines, then how he later resumed his academic career, earned his Ph.D., and went on to teach at the University of Kansas. But Heller’s return to academic life was anything but final: recalled to active duty for the Korean War, he also served in later years with the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.

After a lifetime of changing hats—mortarboard for helmet and back again—Heller, now in his nineties, has recorded his unique perceptions as an educated observer of the world. Steel Helmet and Mortarboard is an absorbing narrative of one individual’s experiences across a spectrum of personal and professional challenges, written with wry humor and insight that reflect a keen ability to master whatever circumstances life brings.

[more]

Surplus Citizens

Struggle and Nationalism in the Greek Crisis

Dimitra Kotouza

Pluto Press, 2018

The crisis in Greece has elicited the full spectrum of responses - from optimism for a left parliamentary politics inspired by Syriza's electoral victory, to pessimism about the intransigence of the EU and calls for the reinstatement of full national sovereignty in Europe. In Surplus Citizens, Dimitra Kotouza questions the terms of the debate by demonstrating how the national framing of social contestation posed obstacles to transformative collective action, but also how this framing has been challenged. Analysing the increasing superfluousness of subordinate classes in Greece as part of a global phenomenon with racialised and gendered dimensions, the book interrogates the strengths, contradictions and limits of collective action and identity in the crisis, from the movement of the squares and neighbourhood assemblies, to new forms of labour activism, environmental struggles, immigrant protests, anti-fascism and pro-refugee activism. Arguing against the strategic fixation on unified identities and pointing instead to the transformative potential of internal dispute within movements, Surplus Citizens highlights the relevance of a discussion of Greece to collective action beyond it, as we continue to traverse a global financial crisis that has provoked conflicts over nationalism, immigration and the rise of neo-fascism.

[more]

Survival

Dislocation and Repair in Burma

François Robinne

National University of Singapore Press, 2027

Captures the tenuous reality of daily life for those in and outside Burma.

In the wake of the military coup of February 2021, a new and unsettling reality has emerged in Burma. Unlike previous uprisings, this time the junta's reach extends beyond marginalized groups and ethnic territories to target the entire spectrum of civil society—urban and rural, young and old, across all groups, faiths, and social classes. The "Spring Revolution" sees Generation Z not only resisting authoritarian rule but also striving to forge a new societal vision.

In the face of totalitarian desocialization, a complex dance of dislocation and repair unfolds, within, outside, and along Burma's international borders. Survival takes a multi-sited approach to explore these dynamics: we hear from asylum seekers in France, the undocumented in Thailand, resistance leaders in constant motion, and, through the medium of the handphone, from within Burma. The result that emerges is a compelling picture of the individual struggle in an unforgiving situation, of interest to anyone who seeks a grounded understanding of the conflict—and what might emerge from it. Highly engaged yet academically rigorous, this compelling book also opens new spaces for understanding the complications of migration in today’s world.

[more]

Surviving the ICE Age

Children of Immigrants in New York

Joanna Dreby

Russell Sage Foundation, 2025

For the past three decades, U.S. immigration policy has become increasingly restrictive, focused on enforcement both at the southern border and across the country. A shift in emphasis from status regularization to criminalization has had rippling effects for families and communities. While we know much about how immigration enforcement impacts the undocumented, we know less about longstanding effects on U.S. citizens. In Surviving the ICE Age, sociologist Joanna Dreby draws on interviews with young adults with foreign-born parents to better understand what it was like to grow up during a time of heightened U.S. migratory control.

Dreby shows that a restrictive approach to immigration creates problems over time and across generations. These issues occur regardless of one’s citizenship status and go beyond deportations. Despite having pride in their heritage, her interviewees did not talk much about immigration. She refers to this unwillingness—and at times, inability—to speak about immigration as silencing. Silencing in a community or family is often intended to protect children, but this can leave them with little information about their backgrounds and status, leading to fear and anxiety instead. Self-silencing often resulted from traumatic experiences tied to enforcement episodes, which sometimes took the form of memory loss or emotional withholding. Dreby finds that experiences with the immigration system that disrupted relationships in a child’s household arising from family separations, moves, or changing roles in the family had especially long-term effects, causing, at times, ongoing mental health issues. Even the risk of immigration involvement left some young adults feeling vulnerable and undermined their sense of safety and security as U.S. citizens.

Dreby also highlights stories that offer hope. Young adults developed strategies to persevere, and children who grew up in communities and families that openly talked about migration felt empowered and fared much better, especially when they had access to resources, such as adequate food and shelter, mental health services, and community support. Dreby calls for policies and practices to mitigate the harms of restrictive migratory control on children’s wellbeing, such avoiding the arrest of parents in front of children and ensuring that U.S. citizen children’s interests are considered in immigration court without their direct involvement.

Surviving the ICE Age details the generational harms caused by U.S. immigration policy and offers suggestions for a better way forward.

[more]

Surviving the Peace

The Struggle for Postwar Recovery in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Peter Lippman

Vanderbilt University Press, 2019

Surviving the Peace is a monumental feat of ground-level reporting describing two decades of postwar life in Bosnia, specifically among those fighting for refugee rights of return. Unique in its breadth and profoundly humanitarian in its focus, Surviving the Peace situates digestible explanations of the region's bewilderingly complex recent history among interviews, conversations, and tableaus from the lives of everyday Bosnians attempting to make sense of what passes for normal in a postwar society.

Essential reading for students of the former Yugoslavia and anyone interested in postwar or post-genocide studies, Surviving the Peace is an instant classic of long-form reporting, an impossible accomplishment without a lifetime of dedication to a place and people.

Peter Lippman's website is http://survivingthepeace.org/.

[more]

Surviving the Slaughter

The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire

Marie Beatrice Umutesi; Foreword by Catharine Newbury

University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

Though the world was stunned by the horrific massacres of Tutsi by the Hutu majority in Rwanda beginning in April 1994, there has been little coverage of the reprisals that occurred after the Tutsi gained political power. During this time hundreds of thousands of Hutu were systematically hunted and killed.
Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire is the eyewitness account of Marie Béatrice Umutesi. She tells of life in the refugee camps in Zaire and her flight across 2000 kilometers on foot. During this forced march, far from the world’s cameras, many Hutu refugees were trampled and murdered. Others died from hunger, exhaustion, and sickness, or simply vanished, ignored by the international community and betrayed by humanitarian organizations. Amidst this brutality, day-to-day suffering, and desperate survival, Umutesi managed to organize the camps to improve the quality of life for women and children.
In this first-hand account of inexplicable brutality, day-to-day suffering, and survival, Marie Béatrice Umutesi sheds light on a backlash of violence that targeted the Hutu refugees of Rwanda after the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1994. Umutesi’s documentation of the flight and terror of these years provides the world a veritable account of a history that is still widely unknown. After translations from its original French into three other languages, this important book is available in English for the first time. It is more than a testimony to the lives and humanity lost; it is a call for those politicians, military personnel, and humanitarian organizations responsible for the atrocious crimes—and the devastating silence—to be held accountable.

“Umutesi’s tale, told with honesty and eloquence, is a tribute to the human spirit, a searing indictment of the agents who perpetrated these horrors, and a reproach to those who turned away.”—Catharine Newbury, African Studies Review

“Restores a human dimension that has been lacking in the history of the genocide and massacres in Rwanda.”—Danielle de Lame, African Studies Review

“A vivid account of the grueling nightmare experienced by tens of thousands of Rwandan civilians whom the world had deliberately forsaken. . . . An outstanding call for justice.”—Aloys Habimama, African Studies Review

“A towering work. . . . An epic for our times, a tale to ponder for the lessons it conveys, testimony so powerful and moving that it reaches an unintended literary greatness.”—Jan Vansina, African Studies Review

“Of all the current books and films ten years after the Rwandan genocide, none is more effective than Surviving the Slaughter . . . . This book carries one along, often as if running with the refugees.”—Anne Serafin, Multicultural Review