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In this article focused upon the UK context, the authors sought to better understand how political elites shaped public debate to reinforce rather than challenge the hostile policy environment for those seeking asylum.

The authors undertook a political claims analysis (Koopmans and Statham, 1999) focussing on a venue that has been pivotal in shaping the discourse around asylum issues in the UK, namely the print media. This work adopts a theoretical frame informed by the work of Stuart Hall to uncover the extent to which debates on asylum during the key period of the refugee emergency in Europe were shaped by political elites.

The study’s findings reveal the extent to which political elites acted as “primary definers” of the “crisis” and utilised that position to cast those arriving in Europe as a threat to be managed.

This research offers a contemporary worked example of political claims analysis in a topical subject area that colleagues across disciplines and contexts may find informative for their own research agendas.

This paper aims at contributing to our understanding of how self-settled Syrian refugees (registered and non-registered) use informal practices to forge their non-political agency and how this agency could be considered as political acts.

This paper was conducted per the qualitative data analysis (in-depth interviews and participant observation), attributed to the critical ethnographic approach, through which refugees’ everyday struggle is explored, additionally, that was incorporated with the analysis of Syrians’ Facebook groups and formal sources.

The research paper concluded that everyday struggle strategies are considered as political acts by acquiring rights that many self-settled Syrian refugees are stripped of by international humanitarian agencies and host government. Hence, registered and unregistered refugees equally forge what is called “informal citizenship” through their presence via a blend of agency forms ranging from hidden agency to explicit one and via their incorporating into the informal contexts, leading them to carve a position of semi-legality that help them to circumvent the formal structural hardship.

This paper endeavors to study how urban refugees as change agents can convert their illegal presence to “probably refugeeness” to unsettle the prominent recognition of them as illegal non-citizens in southern cities.

This “thought paper” is written by the special issue editors as a part of the five papers accepted and published in response to the special issue call for papers on logistics and SCM in the context of relief for refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on “refugee logistics” and analyse the nature and challenges of displacement from a displaced person’s perspective. The paper also argues for a more critical appreciation of the role and value that research in logistics, operations and supply chain management (LOSCM) can play in the delivery of services and care for refugees and IDPs from the perspective of preparedness and logistics planning of humanitarian organisations. The paper further outlines basic challenges to undertaking innovative, boundary pushing valuable and impactful research on “refugee logistics” given the difficult ideological, political and policy context in which “refugee logistics research” will be undertaken. The paper also advocates for more critical research in humanitarian logistics (HL), that explicitly acknowledges its ontological, epistemological and methodological limitations even when ethically sound. The paper concludes by suggesting a future research agenda for this new sub-field of humanitarian logistics research.

Conceptual paper utilising viewpoints, literature reviews as well as original ideas and thoughts of the authors.

The new field of “refugee logistics research” is important. It has been neglected in humanitarian logistics research for too long. Hence, there needs to be more research in this sub-field of humanitarian logistics.

This is a “thought paper”. It is the basic conceptual ideas of the authors. While it is not based on empirical work or data collection, it is based on a comprehensive literature research and analysis.

This paper advocates for the universal human rights of IDPs and refugees and their dignity, and how LOSCM can contribute to upholding such dignity.

It contributes indirectly to logistics policy and refugee policy as well as logistics service quality and advocacy for human rights and human dignity.

Departing from the assumption that discourse is both socially constituted and constitutive, and that social reality is co-constructed by the institutions of mass communication, this chapter takes under scrutiny media representation of the recent refugee crisis in Europe. The objective behind it is to maximise the validity of the Media Proximization Approach (MPA), drawing on the insights from Critical Discourse Studies, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics, in explicating how the media can potentially impact on the salience of issues and thus on public perception of problems and threats along with measures to be taken to deal with them. Examining the data from Poland, a European Union member state from Central Europe, criticised for its anti-refugee stance and refusal to accept the assigned quotas of migrants, and, importantly, the country ‘experiencing’ migrant crisis without refugees, we look at the role of word co-occurrence patterns in the discursive representation of refugees and immigrants in Rzeczpospolita daily and Niezależna.pl, the Polish right-wing press. The analysis, of both quantitative and qualitative nature, focuses on lexical associations of two nouns, uchodźca ‘refugee’ and imigrant ‘immigrant’, and their role as epistemic, axiological and emotional proximization triggers in the process of mediated construction of crisis and European security.

This research explores the educational participation, cultural identification, and linguistic practices of Middle Eastern refugee youth in Vancouver, Canada. Twenty refugee youth aged 15 to 30 participated in this critical ethnography that provided new information about the impacts of pre- and post-migration experiences on their educational attainment, language, and identity construction. Evidence reported here indicates that refugee youth are subject to institutional challenges in both their home and host countries. The youth experienced educational assimilation, biased curriculum, and language discrimination with devastating impacts on their educational participation and overall well-being. In response, this study indicates that young people resist assimilation and racism in educational and wider social settings. This study further suggests that refugee youths’ educational experiences, linguistic practices, self-identification, and well-being should be examined in relation to their pre- and post-migration experiences, and the dominant meta-narratives of their home and host countries (e.g., nationalism).

“No climate change, no climate refugees”. On the basis of this theme, this paper aims to propose a method for undertaking the responsibility for climate refugees literally uprooted by liable climate polluting countries. It also considers the historical past, culture, geopolitics, imposed wars, economic oppression and fragile governance to understand the holistic scenario of vulnerability to climate change.

This paper is organized around three distinct aspects of dealing with extreme climatic events – vulnerability as part of making the preparedness and response process fragile (past), climate change as a hazard driver (present) and rehabilitating the climate refugees (future). Bangladesh is used as an example that represents a top victim country to climatic extreme events from many countries with similar baseline characteristics. The top 20 countries accounting for approximately 82 per cent of the total global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions are considered for model development by analysing the parameters – per capita CO₂ emissions, ecological footprint, gross national income and human development index.

Results suggest that under present circumstances, Australia and the USA each should take responsibility of 10 per cent each of the overall global share of climate refugees, followed by Canada and Saudi Arabia (9 per cent each), South Korea (7 per cent) and Russia, Germany and Japan (6 per cent each). As there is no international convention for protecting climate refugees yet, the victims either end up in detention camps or are refused shelter in safer places or countries. There is a dire need to address the climate refugee crisis as these people face greater political risks.

This paper provides a critical overview of accommodating the climate refugees (those who have no means for bouncing back) by the liable countries. It proposes an innovative method by considering the status of climate pollution, resource consumption, economy and human development rankings to address the problem by bringing humanitarian justice to the ultimate climate refugees.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the key credibility principles used by Migration Agency case-officers in Sweden. More specifically it analyses how they construct arguments about asylum-seeking unaccompanied minors’ credibility in first-decisions.

The study is inspired by a social constructionist approach to discourse and explores how case-officers construct legally legitimate arguments about credibility. The qualitative text analysis is focused on discursive practice. The data selected for analysis consists of 827 excerpts containing case-officers’ credibility reasoning deducted from a sample of 916 decisions.

The main finding is that case-officers question unaccompanied minors by using argumentative techniques in which children appear to be expected to deliver detailed and coherent accounts. In addition, unaccompanied minors’ knowledge-claims can be questioned regardless of decision outcome (rejection or approval). As unaccompanied minors’ claims for asylum appear to be questioned in such an extensive manner, their humanitarian claims also seem to be reduced. The findings of this study suggest that there is a risk that the possibility to be understood as a legitimate asylum seeker, worthy of residency, can be restricted for unaccompanied minors.

The findings indicate that when case-officers base their understanding of credibility on unaccompanied children’s individual life experiences they make use of a limited repertoire of arguments.

This study contributes to insights about how case-officers fulfil legal expectations when assessing unaccompanied minors’ credibility. The findings can be of interest to both legal and social science as well policy planners and immigration practitioners.

This study examines models of traditional and alternative citizenship such as legal, flexible, global and cultural citizenship, as a foundation for understanding “liminal citizenship”. The study identifies international students based in the United States as liminal citizens and examines the role of theatre in encouraging their civic engagement. It creates a model for using applied theatre techniques to raise international students’ awareness of the possibilities of inclusion within their host communities and to empower them to become active community members.

Purpose – With political tensions surrounding migrants in post-9/11 Western societies, scholarship on second-generation immigrants has surged. This study explores the narratives of second-generation Iranian-Dutch women, a previously unstudied group, in relation to their positionality regarding identity and belonging.

Methodology/Approach – By combining focus group discussions with in-depth individual interviews, we explored the narratives of 13 second-generation Iranian-Dutch women. Our focus was on their senses of belonging, cultural identities and lived experiences as they navigated between Dutch society and their parents’ complicated heritage, against the backdrop of the post-9/11 world.

Findings – Although these women are perfectly ‘integrated’, they are still frequently approached and labelled as ‘foreigners’ in society, which negatively impacts their sense of belonging in Dutch society. However, our participants navigated contradicting parental and societal expectations, finding new ways to belong and fashioning cultural identities in multiplicity.

Originality/Value of the Paper – To our knowledge, the specific experiences of second-generation Iranian-Dutch migrants have received no scholarly attention. Our findings further the understanding on relevant second-generation themes such as the immigrant bargain, solidarity between different ethnic minority groups, and new ways of belonging.

Italian trade unions have long since promoted the defense and inclusion of immigrant workers through the promotion, within their organizations, of specific services for immigrants providing information, guidance, and bureaucratic assistance, thus enhancing the growth of immigrant members within the unions. However, only recently unions have started to promote the direct participation of immigrants in their organization. This chapter focuses on the chances of mobility and career of immigrant workers offered by unions, starting from the role of union delegate. The analysis is based on empirical research, conducted in Lombardy between 2011 and 2013, on Cgil and Cisl, the two major Italian unions. The attention to the active participation of foreign workers within the organization is still low and not widespread, but mostly limited to categories with higher presence of immigrant workers and where the board is ready to grab the opportunities offered by the appointment of immigrant unionists and to guarantee them equal chances of union career. This situation, in our opinion, promotes immigrants’ acquisition of union roles and credibility, thus paving the way of internal mobility and career opportunities in the union.