Introduction
An Afghan woman resettled in Christchurch, New Zealand, leaves her Skype video continuously connected with family based in Afghanistan, effectively creating a constant social presence where family members can participate in her daily life. Two Burmese parents work full-time jobs in London to send money to family still living along the ThailandāBurma border. A Vietnamese man who came to the United States as an unaccompanied minor now runs his own company in California and frequently conducts business in Vietnam. Members of the South Sudanese community resettled in Atlanta use Facebook to simultaneously engage with their diaspora across three continents about local elections and tensions in South Sudan as a way of enacting their citizenship from overseas. When disasters strike, whether these arise from natural hazards such as earthquakes or from human-induced crises, refugees will look for sources of information and support from local to transnational locations. What becomes clear in these daily lives is that refugee settlement is increasingly about settling āin placeā where international borders are, at times, unsettled, and at others, powerfully reinforced.
This book examines the above experiences of refugee settlement and uses a theoretical lens of belonging to understand the multiple aspirations associated with integration, social cohesion and participation in a new host society. The descriptors, new and host, can be misleading. Many people from refugee backgrounds might have lived in a given locality for decades. For the children born in these new countries, the refugee label may still accompany them, although they were never refugees themselves. And the notion of host suggests that those who arrive are only visitors who will eventually leave. Some refugees might never return home and will live in their country of resettlement for the rest of their lives. People from refugee backgrounds might have quite significant connections to the wider society around them or they may still feel a lack of a common narrative that ties them across different groups. As this book will show, belonging provides a helpful theoretical lens to examine peopleās commitments to particular places alongside the contextual everyday and extraordinary events that shape forced migration experiences and the wider societyās receptiveness to refugees.
The bookās focus is to inform the theory and practice of belonging to transnational refugee settlement. I employ the terms everyday and extraordinary to consider the contested debates of settlement for those working alongside refugees, whether this is related to service provision, policy or research. One of the bookās key arguments is that media-based representations, political commentary and professional practice discourses often generate dominant understandings of refugee communities through extraordinary stories of adversity. The associated stories of the refugee experience which become powerful, even singular, descriptors of peopleās experiences can construct these communities as traumatized and their actions as the outcomes of war trauma. While there can be few arguments against the fact that refugees experience very difficult and traumatic events, it does not necessarily follow that they are indelibly damaged people.
As this book will demonstrate, it is necessary to identify who has a predominant say in characterizing particular experiences as everyday or extraordinary. In many respects, the forced migration narratives of oppression, trauma and significant adversity represent a powerful currency that helps refugees lay their claims for recognition. This recognition, while granting some benefits and resources in settlement and forced migration circumstances, also limits opportunities for wider civic participation due to the othering dynamics of such narratives. The book uses the concept of belonging to understand the interplay between the everyday and the extraordinary to broaden dominant discourses about refugees and to challenge the notion that meaningful settlement necessarily occurs in local places.
I refer to understandings of the everyday in a non-pejorative sense to conceptualize the routine and commonplace experiences of settlement (education, employment, housing, community relations, and many others). These everyday aspects generally escape critical examination because such activities and commitments are routinely seen as mundane and represent shared experiences with a wider society. This explicit, everyday focus responds to the politics of representation that often portray people from refugee backgrounds on the most sensational aspects of their lives (for instance, living in a refugee camp, being child soldiers, experiencing flight from persecution, and so on). It is all too easy for these narratives to then become dominant descriptors and achieve master status for an individual, family or community ā one that impacts upon their opportunities to participate as peers in settlement contexts.
I refer to the extraordinary to outline experiences that sit beyond the everyday and are not necessarily shared by the wider society. These perspectives inform sensationalist (even voyeuristic) media presentations and, at times, the moral panic of political and populist discourse that essentialize wider societyās perspectives of them (Bogen & Marlowe, 2015; Gale, 2004; Klocker & Dunn, 2003). At the same time, I will emphasize the importance of the extraordinary. For some people, extraordinary experiences represent important aspects of who they are, aspects of themselves that they hold on to and embrace. Such experiences help people to gain entry into refugee camps, acquire refugee status, cross sovereign borders and access services in resettlement contexts. In some instances, these stories and understandings are what grab the attention of the world stage and generate international humanitarian responses. Recent examples of the Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, drowned on a Turkish beach and the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels have galvanized and shaped both local and international responses (albeit in very different ways) to the tens of thousands of people making their way to Europe to escape conflict, persecution and the loss of livelihoods. As I will present in a later chapter, it was the story of the āLost boys of South Sudanā (drawing on the reference to Barrieās novel Peter Pan) that provided an initially warm welcome for thousands of South Sudanese refugees to resettle in the United States. The warmth of the welcome changed, however, after the terrorist event of 9/11, demonstrating how multiple stories and histories come together in dynamic and unexpected ways.
The term refugee is one that is contested and not easily bounded. In relation to several etymologies, its origins come from the French noun rĆ©fugiĆ©, meaning to take shelter or to protect. The term was originally used to mean one seeking asylum until 1914, by which time it had evolved to mean one fleeing home (Boutruche et al., 2008). This general definition, however, does not capture the varied situational contexts and the intersections of particular social, cultural, historical, political histories that refugees emerge from and indeed, are still emerging. For instance, Betts (2013) highlights how the international instruments established to protect refugees after the Second World War have failed to keep pace with the multiple ways that people are displaced, ranging from climate change, globalization, loss of livelihoods and generalized violence. Some refugee situations may arise very quickly such as that in Syria where the country had been stable for many years. Others, such as Sudan and Colombia, show evidence of protracted armed conflicts that extend into decades. Some conflicts between groups have histories that extend into centuries or even millennia. Recent history demonstrates how forced displacement includes a vast array of circumstances: Asians fleeing Uganda under Idi Aminās racist policies in the 1970s; the Salvadorians and Guatemalans displaced by civil war in the 1980s; Afghan refugees trying to escape persecution from Soviet occupation, US invasion and Taliban insurgencies over a forty-year period; Muslim Rohingyas living under the oppressive rule of the Burmese junta since the 1990s; the longstanding conflict in Sri Lanka, which created thousands of internally displaced Tamils; and the harrowing accounts of Jewish refugees during and after the Second World War. And the list continues to grow ā these conflicts are just a few of the many examples across the varied situational geographic, demographic, political and historical contexts that forced migration occurs.
Obtaining refugee status can be critical for people living in protracted and tenuous situations where their safety and security is seriously compromised. This status affords access to support and resources from the 148 states signatory to the 1951 Convention and/or the associated 1967 Protocol as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees acknowledges (UNHCR, 2015d). The 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees formally defines a refugee as:
A person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of persecution because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable to avail himself or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution.
(UNHCR, 2015d)
Critical to the Convention is that signatory countries are to provide protection to refugees and ensure a commitment to non-refoulement (no forced repatriation). The 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees removed the temporal and geographic restrictions outlined in the 1951 Convention.1 A key strength of the Convention is that it enshrines particular rights and human rights protection to those who have well-founded fears of persecution.
Different regions across the world have also revised the definition of a refugee or a refugee-like situation that responds to how displacement occurs. In 1969 a convention of the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union or AU) extended this definition to include as legitimate reasons for refugee status, āexternal aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order in either part or wholeā of a country. Fifty of the 53 African countries have signed it. The Cartagena Declaration of 1984 broadened the scope of the refugee declaration in a similar manner for countries in Latin America. Debates now extend to the relevance of the Convention for climate change where people are forcibly displaced by rising sea levels, desertification and other events that have constrained or destroyed particular livelihoods (Docherty & Giannini, 2009). While the ongoing importance of the 1951 Convention is clear, the new contexts in which forced migration occurs highlights the need to also consider the contemporary ways in which displacement and persecution transpire.
Those people with refugee status who have permanently and safely resettled in another country, are arguably not refugees any more as they have a ādurable solutionā that addresses their well-founded fear of persecution. Other terms have emerged, such as ārefugee backgroundā or āformer refugeeā to respond to those complexities that attest to a personās identity beyond the master status of being a refugee. This book will explore these dynamics and will use the term ārefugeeā while acknowledging that it remains contested and contestable in the academic literature and through peopleās narratives and identities. As Arendt (1943, p. 55) famously stated: āIn the first place, we donāt like to be called ārefugees.āā Although it may be that some refugees no longer identify with this term, it is also true that others still do and some may even embrace it. The plenitude of autobiographical accounts that document peopleās experiences as forced migrants demonstrates how they relate to such histories as aspects of who they are and as an ongoing testimony to the past.
As one South Sudanese man who was resettled in Australia for more than 15 years once stated in response to my question as to whether he still identified as a refugee: āI will always be a refugee ... And if I forget my past, then I wonāt know where I am going.ā Similar sentiments are expressed in Cienfuegos and Monelliās (1983) work on testimonio and the importance of Chileans being able to give public testimony to the experiences of oppression under Pinochetās rule. Primo Levyās (1996) and Viktor Franklās (1964) accounts of survival in concentration camps during the Holocaust also provide such testimony that gives voice to and acknowledges experiences that are, at times, unspeakable. Margalitās (2002) book, entitled The Ethics of Memory, explores the complexities of memory and the associated tensions (even obligations) to remember and at times, to forget. It is not my intent to set up binaries of refugee/migrant, everyday/extraordinary, remembering/forgetting, insider/outsider, past/present, agency/structure, here/there or forced/voluntary, but rather to explore the interplay and spaces between such positions. While such constructions can be helpful in understanding a particular social phenomenon, these positions are best utilized as starting points to further engage with the complexity of peopleās lives, relationships and aspirations. It is on the grey spaces or, as Bhaba (1994) has it, the āin between spacesā, that this book focuses and where belonging is often situated.
My aim throughout this book is twofold. First, I outline the key theoretical debates and discourses that relate to understanding refugee settlement as a transnational experience through the lens of belonging. Second, I contextually apply this framework to previous research studies to examine what is possible through an analysis of the everyday and the extraordinary for professional practice (broadly conceptualized first and then applied to specific fields in later chapters). With reference to the international literature and the case studies of my own research, I examine and illustrate the role of belonging in forced migration and settlement contexts. And, while highlighting that resettled refugee communities have many tools and knowledges to respond to profound difficulties, I will reinforce how the exclusionary experiences of poverty and racism limit their abilities, opportunities and the social affordances to access such resources (Valenti & Gold, 1991; Wellman et al., 2003).2 The moral panic of forced migration and the anti-immigrant platforms that have taken root and even assumed power clearly signal that belonging is an experience and opportunity informed by multiple actors with serious consequences.
This book provides a critical engagement with refugee narratives and representations alongsi...
