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This study focuses on specifically women refugees' experiences of accessing information and how sociocultural barriers impact these experiences aiming to broaden the LIS literature of women refugees' information problems from sociocultural aspects. The socioculturally formed roles of a woman can impact the information practices of women refugees or cause certain information problems during the integration process. Hence, the research questions that drive this study are: What kind of information problems might women refugees face in a new host country? What kind of sociocultural barriers influence their information problems? How do they react toward these information problems?

The study is designed based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with eighteen refugee women living in Sweden. The study is a part of a larger study in which authors intend to explore the information practices and integration challenges of almost 20 or more refugee women living in Sweden.

Women refugees face information overload, difficulties in understanding new communication culture and lack of appropriate sources and networks in a new country. These information problems are influenced by sociocultural barriers such as the role of women, national culture of “collectivism”, small-world and lack of information literacy. Women react in certain ways such as, stressing, panicking, quitting the tasks, wasting time and making wrong decisions which negatively impact the integration process.

The research has its limitations as it is conducted with a small group of women refugees, belong to specific Middle Eastern culture and cannot be generalized. Another limitation is that the interviews are conducted in English language (with sufficient language skill). However, conducting interviews in their mother language would have been an advantage.

Practically, the study provides awareness for official and private organizations, volunteers and policymakers dealing with refugees. The stakeholders involved in the societal integration process of refugees, must consider that women refugees are more prone to information problems due to certain sociocultural influences (i.e. “being a woman” and national culture) and need a separate plan than the male refugees. For instance, by increasing and offering intercultural opportunities at workplaces or schools can encourage the wider social networking for women refugees. The programs aiming to reduce the sociocultural differences among women refugees and the Swedes are needed to be included in the integration policy.

The study intends to help the refugees society and the Swedish society overall by improving the integration plan.

The findings related to the information experiences of women refugees have potential implications for research where the value of information in the integration process is explored. The study meets the gap in previous literature by presenting the gender specific views on information problems from sociocultural aspects. The study also provides future directions to understand how women refugees deal with potential sociocultural barriers to information in a new country.

A refugee is a displaced person who has been forced to cross national boundary and who cannot return home safely. No one likes or chooses to be a refugee. Being a refugee means more than being an alien. It means living in exile and depending on others for such basic needs as food, clothing and shelter. The problem of refugees is the problem of human rights involving a flow of people from places of denial to the regions of guarantee. Today refugee problem is one of the core problems all over the world. It is the most complicated issue. When refugees are hosted in the neighbouring countries, economic, social, political and environment impacts are created on these host countries. The main objective of this chapter is to analyze these impacts created by refugees on the developing host countries. From the moment of arrival, refugees may compete with local citizens for scarce resources such as water, food, housing and medical services. Their presence increases the demands for education, health services, infrastructure such as water supply, sanitation and transportation, and also in some cases, for natural resources such as grazing and firewood.

This study explores the emotional problems affecting refugees in Kakuma refugee camp (northern Kenya). The freelisting technique was used to interview 52 community members and 32 ‘key informants’. Freelisting was found to be useful in this setting, and provided information which could assist with advocacy, programme planning and programme evaluation. The emotional problems most frequently identified were hopelessness, fear, sadness, anger/aggression and worry. Both current stressors and previous losses were said to affect emotional well‐being. While psychosocial interventions are important, programmes addressing refugees' practical needs (particularly safety and material needs) will therefore have a positive impact on psychosocial well‐being. These findings also suggest that some anti‐social behaviours which contribute to problems within and between communities in Kakuma are due in part to emotional problems; if so, addressing emotional problems would be a worthwhile use of resources.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether highly educated refugees have the potential to become active members of the UK knowledge economy and to identify what socio‐political factors are currently excluding/marginalising them.

The empirical work consists of semi‐structured interviews conducted with 15 highly educated refugees residing in the UK. The interviews, which contain theory‐driven and open‐ended questions, elicited how refugees themselves perceive their post‐migration experiences, and especially their employment experiences in the UK.

The participants do not perceive themselves as passive and incompetent, as they are often portrayed. They also claim that their exclusion/marginalisation from the UK economy is not due to any lack of qualifications and skills from their side, but due to ongoing discriminatory processes and to the long process of getting their qualifications validated.

The use of a single method and a cross‐sectional design does not allow an understanding of whether and to what extent the findings apply to other disadvantaged populations, which could be clarified through a comparative, longitudinal study.

Highly educated refugees have the potential to become knowledge‐workers, but certain barriers they face suppress this potential. This is why future policies should continuously support refugee agencies and communities that play a vital role in refugees’ lives and work‐related adaptation and encourage the creation of new ones where they are most needed.

This research, by “giving voice” to the selected participants, reveals the existing contrast between highly educated refugees’ own perceptions and the negative socio‐political discourse surrounding them and highlights the contribution that this population can make to the UK knowledge economy.

In this chapter, the author has described the nexus between climate change and the evolution of refugee problems. The concept of climate refugee and the controversy between refugee and climate refugee were extensively elaborated. The estimates of climate refugees under various dimensions in different parts of the world were exemplified with statistical figures. The solutions of the refugee problems, funding, directions of estimates and social responsibilities towards refugees are described in the activities of international institutions like UNHCR, CCDO, UNFCCC, IPCC, the Red Cross and many others. The chapter also highlights some important policy issues such as charters, funds, response strategy to disaster and disaster recovery plans, support capacity building and climate change adaptation and so on and also cited policies taken by the G20 summit to care for refugees. Besides, the recommendations of COP23 were also included. In conclusion, ‘no climate change, no climate refugees’ slogan is incorporated with suggestions of taking care of sizable percentage shares of refugees by the rich nations.

The aim of this paper was to investigate the criteria and sub-criteria with the most impact on determining a suitable location for refugee camps. This paper also analysed the relationships between the main criteria used in the selection process.

This study applied a combination of fuzzy methods and the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and Analytical Network Process (ANP) methods as tools for multiple-criteria decision analysis. A questionnaire was distributed to field workers in an international humanitarian organization team.

Five main criteria and twenty sub-criteria were defined. Between them, the highest ranked sub-criteria were long-term planning, optimal distribution and opportunity for growth. These findings were specific to the interviewed respondents of presented research at the time the data were collected and offer a potential research design for future research examining different organizations and teams.

The methods and evaluation were based on human opinions that were potentially biased.

The results of this study could be useful to government organizations, UN agencies, humanitarian organizations and other decision-making parties in selecting camp locations for refugees or internally displaced people according to how the importance of particular sub-criteria is understood.

New sub-criteria were included in this research. To date, the combination of fuzzy, DEMATEL and ANP methods has not been previously used in relation to these issues. Scientific knowledge concerning refugee camp siting problems is limited. This research extends this knowledge with the involvement of humanitarian workers as respondents. This paper also offers organizations a process for solving complex decision-making problems with long-term results or effect.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of factors that contribute to refugees’ exclusion from health-care services. More specifically, using institutional theory, this paper identifies regulative pillar-, normative pillar- and cultural/cognitive pillar-related challenges that result in refugees having limited or no access to health-care services.

The paper draws on both secondary research and empirical insights from two qualitative fieldwork studies totaling 37 semi-structured meso-level interviews, observations and focus groups in three Turkish cities (Izmir, Ankara and Edirne), as well as a total of 42 micro-level, semi-structured interviews with refugees and migrants in one large city (Izmir) in Turkey.

This study reveals that systematically stratified legal statuses result in different levels of access to public health-care services for migrants, asylum seekers or refugees based on their fragmented protection statuses. The findings suggest access to health-care is differentiated not only between local citizens and refugees but also among the refugees and migrants based on their legal status as shaped by their country of origin.

While the role of macro challenges such as laws and government regulations in shaping policies about refugees have been examined in other fields, the impact of such factors on refugee services and well-being has been largely ignored in service literature in general, as well as transformative service research literature in particular. This study is one of the first attempts by explicitly including macro-level factors to contribute to the discussion on the refugees’ access to public health-care services in a host country by relying on the institutional theory by providing a holistic understanding of cognitive, normative and regulative factors in understanding service exclusion problem.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the direct and indirect impacts of urban Syrian refugees on the residential urban fabric of Al Mafraq city physically and socially. Physically means regarding architectural style and socially means regarding social cohesion and sense of community. Therefore, the research questions are: What are the main source of tensions between the urban Syrian refugees and Al Mafraq host community that hinders the social cohesion? And what is the impact of the urban Syrian refugees on Al Mafraq city socially and architecturally?

Different research methods were used to explore and provide a rich description of the direct and indirect impacts of urban Syrian refugees on Al Mafraq city architecturally and socially. Desk reviews, focus group discussions and semi-structured individual in-depth interviews were used to explore the social impact of the Syrian refugees on Al Mafraq city. In addition, a qualitative comparative analysis was used to explore their impact on architectural style and urban sprawl.

The results show that changes have occurred on the character of the residential environment resulting in a conversion about the urban fabric of Al Mafraq city both physically, in regard to architectural style, and socially, regarding social cohesion and sense of community. Physically, the city suffers from a decline in the uniformity of the built environment, resulting in a partial loss of its identity as a homogenous place with calm, cohesive residential neighborhoods. On the other hand, the social fabric of the city is losing its homogeneity and solidarity, causing a decline in the sense of community, social cohesion and levels of trust, and a rise in the social tension leading to severe conflicts among community members.

The different stakeholders should express high concern for the different sources of tensions between the urban Syrian refugee and Al Mafraq host community. They should foster formal and informal communication and promote dialogue between the two communities to improve social relations and reduce the tension between them. The consequences of Syrian asylum on hosting countries present an issue that has been vastly studied by several scholars and international agencies. Research, reports and surveys all denote the negative impact of refugees, especially in cases where resources are scarce, as is the case with Jordan. As a part of such consequences, Al Mafraq city is moving in the wrong direction as a result of the increasing flow of refugees.

The current discourse about the influence of urban refugees on social and architectural style among host communities lacks veracity. Therefore, the significance of this research is offering an alternative academic view to enrich current knowledge and encourage further discourse research about urban refugees. In addition, this research is a comprehensive and double focused, not just on social inclusion and tensions but on urban environment and architecture. This research is useful for architects, urban designers and planners, sociologists, policymakers and humanitarian and peace-building practitioners in the urban non-camp complex emergency setting.

Service providers can potentially play a critical role in responding to the global refugee crisis. However, recent evidence suggests that local service employees’ negative and inappropriate behavior is hindering efforts to alleviate the problems faced by refugees. As a response to the call to action to engage with the global refugee crisis in service context and adopting the transformative service research perspective, this paper aims to understand service employees’ motivations to engage in sabotage when they interact with refugees in service settings.

This paper focuses on the case of Syrian refugees in Turkey as a context. Using a netnographic study, this study analyzes comments by Turkish service employees in different social media groups and newspapers’ online platforms to reveal the motivations of those employees to engage in sabotage behavior.

The findings of this study revealed employees use five emerging themes as potential motivations to justify their sabotage behavior when serving refugees: perceived scarcity of resources, perceived fairness, perceived identity mismatch, perceived role of government and perceived role of other nations.

The findings of this study have implications for service organizations, communities and governments to manage, change and even remove some of those perceptions that lead to employee sabotage resulting in increased suffering of refugees.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to examine the employee sabotage behavior in the context of serving refugees.

Thousands of Eritrean youth flee due to extreme domestic discontent with Eritrean Government. Little research has been done on Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia. The purpose of this paper is to explore the difficulties facing Eritrean refugees in the Shimelba Refugee Camp in northern Ethiopia. The study explores the refugees’ pre-migration experiences as well as their life difficulties in the refugee camp.

This study employed a cross-sectional qualitative approach. Relevant data were collected through personal interviews with a sample of 15 refugees. The study was also supplemented by the researcher’s personal observations regarding the living conditions of the refugees in the camp.

Gross human rights violations at home forced the Eritreans to flee in to Ethiopia. Refugees reported their experiences of arrest, torture, and abuse, due to their dissenting political and religious opinions. Moreover, they fled Eritrea to escape harsh compulsory conscription into the Eritrean military service. Unemployment and lack of income were also important push factors. Factors identified as threats to the psychosocial health of refugees at the refugee camp include the feeling of isolation, the absolute uncertainty of the future, fears concerning the safety of the family left behind, the strictness of the structure within the camp, and the fear of health-related problems associated with the limited health care facilities.

Further research investigating the mental health problems of the refugees employing quantitative methods is needed. Also, research about the potential avenues for ameliorating the challenges faced by these refugees is desirable.

This paper gives an insight to the situation of Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia, which includes the reasons why they flee Eritrea, their experiences during flight, and the conditions in which Eritrean refugees live in the camp from the point of view of the refugees themselves. Understanding the challenges facing the refugees has implications for how short- and long-term policies can be altered to better serve them.