Troubled Transit

Troubled Transit
Author: Antje Missbach
Publisher: ISEAS - YUSOF ISHAK INSTITUTE
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2015-09-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9814620564

Troubled Transit considers the situation of asylum seekers stuck in limbo in Indonesia from a number of perspectives. It presents not only the narratives of many transit migrants but also the perceptions of Indonesian authorities and of representatives of international and non-government organizations responsible for the care of transiting asylum seekers. Fascinated by the extraordinary and seemingly limitless resilience shown by asylum seekers during their often lengthy and dangerous journeys, the author highlights one particular fragment of their journeys — their time in Indonesia, which many expect to be the last stepping stone to a new life. While they long for their new life to unfold, most asylum seekers become embroiled in the complexities of living in transit. Indonesia, a vast archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, is more than a location where people spend time waiting; it is a nation state that interacts with transiting asylum seekers and formulates policies that have a profound impact on their experience in transit there. Troubled Transit tries to explain the complexities faced by the transiting migrants within the context of the Indonesian government and its political challenges, including its relationship with Australia. The Australia-centric view of recent asylum seeker issues has tended to ignore the larger socio-political context of the migratory routes and the perspectives of transit states towards asylum seekers stuck in transit. This book hopes to direct the Australia-centric gaze northwards to take Indonesian policies and policymaking into account, thereby giving Indonesia more relevance as a transit country and as an important partner in regional protection schemes and migration management. Even though some Indonesian policies and practices are less than favourable for asylum seekers, and even reprehensible from a human rights perspective, more attention must be paid to ongoing developments that impact on transiting asylum seekers in Indonesia if any of the hardships they suffer there are to be alleviated.

Forced Migration

Forced Migration
Author: Alice Bloch
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2018-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 131722695X

Forced Migration: Current Issues and Debates provides a critical engagement with and analysis of contemporary issues in the field using inter-disciplinary perspectives, through different geographical case studies and by employing varying methodologies. The combination of authors reviewing both the key research and scholarship and offering insights from their own research ensures a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the current issues in forced migration. The book is structured around three main current themes: the reconfiguration of borders including virtual borders, the expansion of prolonged exile, and changes in protection and access to rights. The first chapters in the collection provide both context and a theoretical overview by situating current debates and issues in their historical context including the evolution of field and the impact of the colonial and post-colonial world order on forced migration and forced displacement. These are followed by chapters framed around substantive issues including deportation and forced return; protracted displacements; securitising the Mediterranean and cross-border migration practices; refugees in global cities; forced migrants in the digital age; and second-generation identity and transnational practices. Forced Migration offers an original contribution to a growing field of study, connecting theoretical ideas and empirical research with policy, practice and the lived experiences of forced migrants. The volume provides a solid foundation, for students, academics and policy makers, of the main questions being asked in contemporary debates in forced migration.

Forced Migration in Transit

Forced Migration in Transit
Author: Ludger Pries
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2024-07-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 104010214X

This book compares the life courses of forced migrants in two of the world’s most important transit countries: Turkey and Mexico. It examines the local, regional, and global contexts of their experiences, trajectories, and biographical projects, caught between return, stay, and forward movement. Forced migration has increased rapidly around the world in recent years, with Mexico and Turkey experiencing particularly high numbers of migrants, as conflict, violence, authoritarian regimes, environmental disasters, economic instability, lack of opportunity, and generalized violence have driven people to leave their homes in search of a better life. With a special focus on organized violence, this book analyzes the specific impact of organized violence on the trajectories and biographies of forced migrants, situating these life courses in the political, economic, cultural, and social contexts of the countries of origin (Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria; El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) and in the country of transit (Turkey and Mexico). Using extensive original empirical data and analysis, it argues that forced migration is a long-lasting social process based on everyday actions and social practices throughout the migration trajectory. Systematically comparing two of the world’s most important transit countries, this book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of migration, politics, international relations, and sociology.

Forced Displacement and Migration

Forced Displacement and Migration
Author: Hans-Joachim Preuß
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2021-10-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3658329025

This book presents effective long-term solutions for displacement and migration against the background of the current debates. It offers insights on practical suggestions for dealing with displacement and migration due to violence, examines ideas for the management of global migration movements and looks into the integration of refugees and migrants. Throughout the chapters, experts from science, politics and practice shed light on the causes of global migration and the consequences of migration on a political, economic and social level. The focus of the discussion is not the avoidance of migratory movements, but above all the use of positive effects in countries of origin, transit and destination. The book is a must-read for researchers, policy-makers and politicians, interested in international cooperation and in a better understanding of causes, consequences and solutions of displacement and forced migration.

Lives in Transit

Lives in Transit
Author: Wendy A. Vogt
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2018-11-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520298543

Lives in Transit chronicles the dangerous journeys of Central American migrants in transit through Mexico. Drawing on fieldwork in humanitarian aid shelters and other key sites, Wendy A. Vogt examines the multiple forms of violence that migrants experience as their bodies, labor, and lives become implicated in global and local economies that profit from their mobility as racialized and gendered others. She also reveals new forms of intimacy, solidarity, and activism that have emerged along transit routes over the past decade. Through the stories of migrants, shelter workers, and local residents, Vogt encourages us to reimagine transit as a site of both violence and precarity as well as social struggle and resistance.

Forced Migration and Social Trauma

Forced Migration and Social Trauma
Author: Andreas Hamburger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2018-10-31
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429778910

Forced Migration and Social Trauma addresses the topic of social trauma and migration by bringing together a broad range of interdisciplinary and international contributors, comprising refugee care practitioners, trauma researchers, sociologists and specialists in public policy from all along the Balkan refugee route into Europe. It gives the essence of a moderated dialogue between psychologists and psychoanalysts, sociologists, public policy and refugee care experts. Migration is connected to social trauma and cannot be handled without being aware of this context. The way refugees are treated in the transit or target countries is often determined by the socio-traumatic history of these countries. Social trauma can be collectively committed and perpetuated, leaving transgenerational traces in posttraumatic and attachment disorders, uprootedness and loss of social and political confidence. Media and cultural artefacts like press, TV and the internet influence collective coping as well as traumatic perpetuation. This book shows how xenophobia in the refugee receiving or transit countries can be caused by projection rather than by experience, and that the way refugees are received and regarded in a country may be connected to the country’s cultural‐traumatic history. Refugees, who are often individually and collectively traumatised, experience multiple re-enactments; however, such retraumatisations between refugees and receiving populations or institutions often remain unaddressed. The split between welcoming and hostile attitudes sometimes leads to unconscious institutional defences, such as lack of cooperation between medical, psychotherapeutic, humanitarian and legal institutions. An interdisciplinary and international exchange on migration and social trauma is necessary on all levels – this book gives convincing examples of this dialogue. Forced Migration and Social Trauma will be of great interest to all who are involved in the modern issues of refuge and migration.

Lives in Transit

Lives in Transit
Author: Elena Fontanari
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2018-10-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351234048

This book explores the border-crossing mobilities of refugees within Europe. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Germany and Italy, it examines the precarious everyday lives of non-citizens living between and beyond EU internal borders. With attention to the constant re-construction of borders within Europe through negotiation practices, the author shows how the tensions that exist between refugees on the move and the structural constraints that limit their movement produce ‘interstices’ – small spaces of possibility that open up as a result of refugees’ struggling within structural constraints. A comprehensive understanding of the long-term effects of EU borders upon refugees’ lives is then afforded through a particular focus on the post-arrival period. Examining the protracted precariousness and multi-directional hyper-mobility in Europe that emerges from the dynamics of the relation between structural mechanisms and the agency of individuals, Lives in Transit reveals how the border regime in Europe impacts mostly upon the temporal rather than the spatial dimensions of refugees’ lives, affecting their subjectivities and sense of self. This ‘dispossession’ of time is advocated as the main problem with the experience of refugees in Europe, causing them to claim a temporal justice, which seeks to gain back control of their own lives and personhood. Calling for migration to be understood as a process of ‘becoming subjects’, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, and politics with interests in migration and diaspora studies.

Survival Migration

Survival Migration
Author: Alexander Betts
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2013-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0801468957

International treaties, conventions, and organizations to protect refugees were established in the aftermath of World War II to protect people escaping targeted persecution by their own governments. However, the nature of cross-border displacement has transformed dramatically since then. Such threats as environmental change, food insecurity, and generalized violence force massive numbers of people to flee states that are unable or unwilling to ensure their basic rights, as do conditions in failed and fragile states that make possible human rights deprivations. Because these reasons do not meet the legal understanding of persecution, the victims of these circumstances are not usually recognized as "refugees," preventing current institutions from ensuring their protection.In this book, Alexander Betts develops the concept of "survival migration" to highlight the crisis in which these people find themselves. Examining flight from three of the most fragile states in Africa—Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia—Betts explains variation in institutional responses across the neighboring host states. There is massive inconsistency. Some survival migrants are offered asylum as refugees; others are rounded up, detained, and deported, often in brutal conditions. The inadequacies of the current refugee regime are a disaster for human rights and gravely threaten international security. In Survival Migration, Betts outlines these failings, illustrates the enormous human suffering that results, and argues strongly for an expansion of protected categories.

Weapons of Mass Migration

Weapons of Mass Migration
Author: Kelly M. Greenhill
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2011-06-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0801457424

At first glance, the U.S. decision to escalate the war in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, China's position on North Korea's nuclear program in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the EU resolution to lift what remained of the arms embargo against Libya in the mid-2000s would appear to share little in common. Yet each of these seemingly unconnected and far-reaching foreign policy decisions resulted at least in part from the exercise of a unique kind of coercion, one predicated on the intentional creation, manipulation, and exploitation of real or threatened mass population movements. In Weapons of Mass Migration, Kelly M. Greenhill offers the first systematic examination of this widely deployed but largely unrecognized instrument of state influence. She shows both how often this unorthodox brand of coercion has been attempted (more than fifty times in the last half century) and how successful it has been (well over half the time). She also tackles the questions of who employs this policy tool, to what ends, and how and why it ever works. Coercers aim to affect target states' behavior by exploiting the existence of competing political interests and groups, Greenhill argues, and by manipulating the costs or risks imposed on target state populations. This "coercion by punishment" strategy can be effected in two ways: the first relies on straightforward threats to overwhelm a target's capacity to accommodate a refugee or migrant influx; the second, on a kind of norms-enhanced political blackmail that exploits the existence of legal and normative commitments to those fleeing violence, persecution, or privation. The theory is further illustrated and tested in a variety of case studies from Europe, East Asia, and North America. To help potential targets better respond to—and protect themselves against—this kind of unconventional predation, Weapons of Mass Migration also offers practicable policy recommendations for scholars, government officials, and anyone concerned about the true victims of this kind of coercion—the displaced themselves.

Forced Migration

Forced Migration
Author: Ludger Pries
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2024-07-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1035310317

Building on existing debates in international organizations, policy and academia, this insightful book argues for a broader transnational perspective on the concept of forced migration and its multiple contexts and catalysts. It analyzes the different social groups of forced migrants, treating them neither as passive victims nor as activist heroes, but as social actors under highly constrained conditions.