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This chapter interrogates the practice of gender-based asylum as a window to the problem of gender-based violence (GBV) as a driver of migration, with a focus on Southeast Europe, reporting on one instance of the intersection between the more private matter of gender and the realms of “high politics.”

The research is based on qualitative methods, primarily drawn from existing (written) sources, including legal cases, government and NGO reports, and other documents, supplemented by information gathered through in-depth interviews.

This research found that the region is a source of migrants escaping GBV, and that migrants from this region have been agents in moving the practice of gender-based asylum forward in recent years. That migration is increasingly multidirectional. Further, the “West” offers gender-based asylum inconsistently.

Political and policy change on these matters across this region were transitioning rapidly when this chapter was written; there will be a need, therefore, for updates based on any new developments.

Policy progress should be based on recognition of Southeast Europe’s varied roles as receiving, transit, and destination countries as the region’s viability and visibility increase.

The chapter analyzes a legal terrain that is rarely done outside of the field of law. It offers the most recent analysis of current developments in gender-based asylum with a Southeast Europe focus. Finally, it contributes empirical research to the evolving theoretical discussions of the privatization of the public sphere, particularly for emerging democracies.

This paper argues that intersectionality ought to be a vital tool to identify and recognise those who are refugees. It provides a useful way to distinguish refugees from migrants as well as making it possible to screen for asylum seekers who are at greater risk of experiencing specific vulnerable situations, such as sexual and gender-based violence. This study therefore argues that intersectionality is useful for risk assessment processes as well as for triggering special protection mechanisms.

This research article draws from a cross-cultural empirical study conducted in Greece, Uganda, and Israel on problems asylum seekers and refugees face in host countries.

It is argued that while it is important to identify and screen for asylum seekers who have survived or are at greater risk of experiencing sexual and gender-based violence to provide special protection, it may lead to what has been called a “categorical fetishism”, in this case, applied to vulnerability. Such stigmatising and disempowering perceptions of refugees and their experiences may lead to the view that there are “good” refugees and asylum seekers who are worthy of protection, as opposed to “others”.

This original empirical article provides a new way of examining issues of refugee status determination to ensure fairer ways of doing so.

Several recent statistical analyses provide overwhelming evidence for substantial injustice in immigration court decisions. Writers also explored the data for evidence of bias. Several ended with recommendations for more legal training for judges and more professional appellate review. These recommendations assume that the problem is in the interpretation of the law and conduct of the trial. My own experience has been that there is actually a greater problem in the interpretation of facts, at several levels. Courts provide for translators, but merely verbal translation is not enough. Cultural translation is required. In this chapter I illustrate what cultural translation is with instances from five different asylum cases that I have been involved in as an expert witness. I conclude with recommendations to support better use of this kind of information.

The purpose of this paper is to address two questions: first, what contracts, instruments and accounting activities constitute Australia’s offshore asylum seeker processing policy in practice? Second, how are notions of legitimacy and accountability mediated through the network constituted by this policy?

The paper is located in the critical interpretivist approach to accounting research. It is based on an exhaustive documentary analysis. Policy documents, contract documents, records of parliamentary inquiries (Hansard) and legislation were analysed drawing on a network policy perspective.

The paper finds that the Australian Government has sought to escape its accountability obligations by employing a range of approaches. The first of these approaches is the construction of a network involving foreign states, private corporations and non-government organizations. The second is through a watered down accountability regime and refusal to be accountable for the day-to-day life of asylum seekers in offshore processing centres through a play with the meaning of “effective control”. Yet while the policy network seems designed to create accountability gaps, the requirement within the network to remain financially accountable undermines the governments claims not to be responsible for the conditions in the detention camps.

The paper focuses largely on the period starting from when Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister to the death in Papua New Guinea of asylum seeker Reza Barati on 17 February 2014. Earlier periods are beyond the scope of this paper.

The paper will result in the identification of deficiencies inhuman rights accountability for extra-territorialized and privatised immigration detention and may contribute towards the formulation of effective policy recommendations to overcome such deficiencies. The paper also provides empirical data on, and academic understanding of, immigration detention outsourcing and offshoring.

The paper will inform debate regarding treatment of unauthorized maritime arrivals and asylum seekers generally.

The paper provides the first detailed and full understanding of the way Australia’s offshore asylum seeker processing policy is practiced. The paper also provides an empirical analysis of the way national policy and its associated accountability mechanisms emerge in response to the competing legitimacy claims of the international community and national electorate.

While many consider court involvement in immigration matters a given, in liberal nation-states, there is actually a substantial degree of variation. This chapter revisits two “critical junctures” in the early immigration histories of Canada and Germany to show that institutions and policy legacies are not just historical backdrop, but actually shaped the strategies of political actors, subsequent institutional configurations, and policy options for long periods of time, thereby revealing unintended consequences, as well as alternative paths that the involvement of the courts (and other actors) could have taken.

This paper aims to understand the discrepancy between Germany’s immediate positive response to the so-called “Europe 2015's refugee crisis“ and the strict asylum legislation adopted in Germany in the following year.

The discrepancy is attributed to external and internal forces. The external force is Germany’s obligation to adhere to the Common European Asylum System. The internal force is the role of the different policy actors. The paper focuses on the role of the media as an example of a private policy actor. Through adopting the theory of the social construction of target populations, the paper studies how the media constructs “asylum seekers”, the target of the new asylum legislation. The role of the media is analyzed using the methodology of qualitative content analysis of a selected number of newspaper articles.

The majority of the studied articles problematized receiving and hosting refugees and focused on the reason behind migration differentiating between asylum seekers fleeing conflict areas and all others who might be abusing the asylum channel. The findings of the content analysis, as such, resonate with the amendments that focused on facilitating the integration of accepted “refugees” but restricted further entry. As such, it could be argued that these findings explain the influence of the media on the amendments and as such provide an explanation to the discrepancy between the initial response and the amendments.

The analysis focused on one newspaper. The findings, as such, are not representative. The aim is only to provide an example of how the German media dealt with the refugee crisis and to suggest using the theory chosen by the paper to analyze the link between asylum legislation and the construction of asylum seekers. To understand how asylum legislation is influenced by how asylum seekers are constructed, more studies are needed. Such studies could analyze the role played by other media outputs and/or the role played by other policy actors in constructing the target of the policy.

The media’s response is based on analyzing a sample of newspaper articles published by a German newspaper following the so-called 2015 refugee crisis. Accordingly, the findings represent an original endeavor to understand how the media reacted to the crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the diversity of trauma Latin American (LA) refugee children in the USA experience across migration. It proposes ways that practitioners and policymakers can use knowledge from existing research to improve services and respect the rights of LA children.

The paper used a systematic review approach supplemented by additional sources to capture current representative knowledge. The paper uses staged migration and social ecological approaches for organization and discussion.

LA children have historically and contemporarily been exposed to more instances and types of trauma than their non-immigrant US counterparts. LA refugee children have a high need for international protection that is not reflected in the US policy.

Knowledge of possible trauma types among LA children can inform practitioner expectations and prepare them for care management. Officers must be well-trained in both potential trauma-related content and geographic context and have excellent interviewing skills. Lawyers, advocates and judges – the latter who create precedent – play a critical role in children’s cases and should have access to high-quality, geographically and historically relevant and contemporary information.

The levels of violence in Latin America; the rate of child trauma; and the spike in unaccompanied children at the border compels the USA to reassess their positions on (a) refugee caps, (b) asylum screenings and (c) interception-related policies, protocol and practice.

This the first review to specifically focus on empirical trauma research specific to the LA child’s migration experience.

In our global world, international cooperation has vital importance when addressing humanitarian disasters. Today, as the majority of refugees live in the Southern countries proximate to their homelands, neighboring countries are predominantly the ones that carry the bulk of the refugee burden. Under certain circumstances, states engage in international cooperation in managing refugee crises; to this end, this study analyzes the motivations behind the signing of the 2016 European Union (EU)–Turkey refugee deal and its outcomes for both parties. Past research has shown that the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe demonstrated that the initiatives that the EU countries embarked upon to pursue a monolithic policy against this mass flow fell short and, therefore, enhanced Turkey's leverage with Europe, which provided Turkey with the ability to gain concessions in bilateral talks. However, this study claims that the EU member countries were in a more advantageous position compared to Turkey as a consequence of signing the refugee deal, and it is better to characterize the deal between the parties as burden-shifting rather than burden-sharing. In addition, although the inflow of approximately one million refugees to European shores panicked the European states and coerced most of them to return to their own national migration policies, this study shows that no concrete concessions were provided to Turkey to manage this massive flow. The provisions of the Deal were not the extraordinary payoffs that EU member countries offered Turkey to fight against the irregular migration, but the extension of EU's traditional migration policy.

This chapter explores expert witnessing in anthropology and the raison d’être of cultural expertise as an integrated socio-legal concept that accounts for the contribution of social sciences to the resolution of disputes and the protection of human rights. The first section of this chapter provides a short historical outline of the occurrence and reception of anthropological expertise as expert witnessing. The second section surveys the theoretical reflections on anthropologists’ engagement with law. The third section explores the potential for anthropological expertise as a broader socio-legal notion in the common law and civil law legal systems. The chapter concludes with the opportunity and raison d’être of cultural expertise grounded on a skeptical approach to culture. It suggests that expert witnessing has been viewed mainly from a technical perspective of applied social sciences, which was necessary to set the legal framework of cultural experts’ engagement with law, but had the consequence of entrenching the impossibility of a comprehensive study of anthropological expert witnessing. While this chapter adopts a skeptical approach to culture, it also argues the advantages of an interdisciplinary approach that leads to an integrated definition of cultural expertise.