Emotions and Belonging in Forced Migration

Syrian Refugees and Asylum Seekers

Basem Mahmud

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032018607
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000442816
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Emotions and Belonging in Forced Migration takes a sociology of emotions approach to gain a better understanding of the present situation of forced migration.

Furthermore, it helps to bring the voices and views of forced migrants to academic and public debates in Western society, where they have been generally absent and often investigated with predefined concepts and categories based on theories having little relevance to their cultural and social experiences. This work, however, is based on an inductive methodology that carefully carries the voices of forced migrants throughout the research. Therefore, it will be of interest for various audiences from different disciplines in social sciences, as for any readers seeking to learn more about the refugees in his building, neighbourhood, city, or country.

Finally, it provides an insightful lens for those who wants to know more about Syria and the Arab uprisings after 2010: It is the first study of what Syrians feel during the entirety of their difficult ordeal fleeing Syria, traversing different countries in the global South, and landing in Western ones. No other book treats this thematic focus with the same geographic and temporal breadth.

Chapter 1

The study of forced migrants’ emotions and belonging^*

DOI: 10.4324/9781003180821-2

Many studies have demonstrated the close connection between emotions and belonging in migration, both explicitly and implicitly. Emotions are essential for understanding various social phenomena: emotional labor performed by transnational workers, transnational childhoods, transnational care, return migrant visits, transnational family reunions, longing, and the emotionalized ‘national’ family and migration writings (see Skrbis, 2008). They are also necessary for understanding migrants’ subjectivities, as Walsh (2012) demonstrates in her research about British migrants’ emotions in Dubai. Wang’s (2016) study about first-generation Chinese migrants in New Zealand shows that in migration, emotions and home-construction interact with each other in an “amplified and more dramatic way”. However, the focus is mostly on labor migrants, and few studies have been done on refugees and asylum seekers’ emotions and belonging (see Boccagni & Baldassar, 2015). In the following lines, I investigate how these emotions have been approached.

What approaches exist to investigate forced migrants’ emotions?

Until the beginning of the 1990s, the migrant was seen as a person who is connected only to his new place. However, with the emergence of transnationalism theory,¹ this image changed. This raised more questions about the migrant’s emotions because now he is seen as a person connected to both the place where the family and home is, and to the new place where he lives. Emotions are not merely “convenient and occasional resources” which help to explain the transnational family, but are themselves “constitutive of the transnational family experience itself” (Skrbis, 2008, p. 236). Nolin’s ‘refugee transnationalism’ incorporates political violence into the concept of transnational migration. It suggests two key shifts: (1) from a focus on connections to a focus on “ruptures and sutures” of belonging and identity. (2) From “community identity” to “transnational social fields” and multi-scaled social relations (Nolin, 2006, p. 182). However, more attention to violence, should not lead us adopt the pathological approach that focuses on the mental health problems caused by those emotions that accompany violence—such as shame, humiliation, anger, anxiety, guilt, etc. In a study conducted in Western Australia, Val Colic-Peisker and Farida Tilbury (2003) found that medicalization of the refugee experience may have negative results by pushing refugees into a passive “victim role”. Talal Asad (2003) suggests that pain and suffering could also play an essential role in the construction of the actor’s agency. Another approach that looks at what people do with emotions could provide a rich understanding of their construction of the sense of belonging; the experience of self-transcendence related to agony or violence leads to new values and value commitments (Joas, 2000). This is due to the close connections between emotions and values or moral judgment, as many scholars argue (Eisenberg, 2000; Haidt et al., 1993; Von Scheve, 2015).

Marlowe’s work (2017), entitled Belonging and Transnational Refugee Settlement: Unsettling the Everyday and the Extraordinary, questions belonging by focusing on ‘the everyday’ and ‘the extraordinary’ in the refugee’s experience. In this book, Marlowe (2017) defines ‘the extraordinary’ as those experiences that often sit “beyond the everyday and which are not necessarily shared by the wider society” (Marlowe, 2017, p. 36). Everyday practices seem to be hidden because they are related to the mundane, ordinary, and routine actions of both locals and refugees. The extraordinary, on the other hand, which refers to specific cases of the refugee’s experience, becomes an issue of interest for media and public debate as well as much research on migration. This extraordinary representation may become an obstacle to their integration and participation in society.² This is because they are often represented as traumatized people. However, this does not mean that the extraordinary cannot provide any benefits for the refugee, especially for their claim of recognition (2017, p. 37). What is essential here is to take into consideration these two different kinds of experience. Early phases of migration are to some extent full of these extraordinary experiences, but once the refugee is settled the everyday practices predominate. Seen in this way, I agree with Marlowe that refugee resettlement is about protection, while the settlement is about belonging (2017, p. 25). People make sense of their experience, and the extraordinary may still accompany them. The question is how they interpret it during the settlement and how these interpretations interact with their feelings of belonging.³ Thus, to understand refugees’ experiences we need to consider the whole story from beginning to end. Furthermore, we must also understand who is defining, what is extraordinary, what is not, and how refugees respond, resist, or challenge. That is because these definitions impact the refugee’s representations and his life (cf. Marlowe, 2017).

Based on what we have seen until now, we could say that there are three main approaches to investigating forced migrants’ emotional lives: (1) the everyday encounters that look into the everyday life and produce questions such as how people give meanings to the world around them, reinterpret it, and make sense from their experience; (2) The therapeutic, where the main interest is the consequences of trauma—which is itself almost a predefined concept—on the forced migrant’s life after the flight; (3) The extraordinary, which ignores the everyday life and focuses on the extraordinary; specific events that refugees and asylum seekers did not share with the society of destination. The last two approaches are the most dominant, and the commonality between them is that they both contribute to the presentation of the forced migrants as a ‘strange’ or ‘traumatized’ person.⁴ To this, we should add the tendency to approach forced migrants under the umbrella of migrants. All of this prevented the development of solid theoretical knowledge about forced migrants’ emotions. Nevertheless, transnational and translocal approaches brought more considerable interest in the emotional lives of the migrants and demonstrated the central role of belonging. In this way, belonging and emotions became essential concepts for understanding the experience of forced migrants. However, the relationship between them remains unclear. As Halse (2018) argues, “emotions play an important part in constructing belonging and social collectivities. But emotions-as-belonging can have risky, even dire, effects because emotions can circle back on themselves in ways that reinforce and entrench boundaries, contestation and the politics of belonging” (p. 14). Therefore, it is imperative to study the different functions of emotions in constructing belonging/(non)belonging.

To summarize, the dominant approaches (the therapeutic and the extraordinary) in research about forced migrants’ emotions prevent an understanding of their subjectivities. Therefore, I argue along with Albrecht (2016, p. 29) that

aiming for the study in the field of a sociology of emotions that focuses on the general functions of emotions in interactions during the process of migration, none of the research done so far on this subject goes far enough. The potential of an accordant perspective has not been fully tapped yet.

This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of this process by investigating the wide-ranging functions of emotions in constructing belonging among forced migrants in the destination country. A sociological approach that looks at the role emotions play in forced migrants’ experiences, and examines its role in the home construction process, could provide enormous benefits to policymakers seeking information on how to better deal with this issue and to build on refugees’ coping strategies and encourage them toward more active engagement in this process. This was about forced migrants’ emotions, but what about their feeling of belonging? How should this be studied?

Belonging: which definition?

‘Belonging’ has been used in different ways with different meanings (Lähdesmäki et al., 2016, p. 235). Researchers agree that belonging is an important human need (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Maslow, 1954; Sedgwick & Yonge, 2008). The human being needs to establish and maintain relationships with others because that is a vital component of mental health and belonging is about constructing social bonds (Anant, 1967; Hagerty et al., 1992; Hagerty & Williams, 1999). However, this approach did not help to distinguish belonging from other similar concepts such as identity, citizenship, and a sense of community. All of these concepts came to be used synonymously for belonging (cf. Antonsich, 2010). Looking into those studies that defined it more rigorously, we can identify three main definitions:

1. Belonging as ‘fitting in’ and being accepted. After reviewing more than 21 articles that explicitly defined belonging, researchers arrived at the following conclusion: “Sense of belonging was often referred to as a personal feeling or perception of an individual as they related to or interacted with others, a group, or a system that was separate from an individual’s actions, behavior or social participation. Feeling needed, important, integral, valued, respected or feeling in harmony with the group or system, characterized most definitions of belonging” (Mahar et al., 2013). However, we might ask, does ‘fitting in’ and being important or accepted in the group suffice to belong? Mahar et al. (2013) present five necessary elements for understanding the sense of belonging. These are: subjectivity (about being accepted and fitting in), groundedness (referent group that serves to ground individuals’ subjectivity), reciprocity (sense of connectedness between the individual and the referent group), dynamism (refers to the physical and social environments), and self-determination (the right of the individual to choose to interact with referents). May (2011) also remarks on this issue. For her, belonging is an “intersubjective experience that necessarily involves other people. We make claims for belonging which others either reject or accept and therefore, mere familiarity with a place, a group of people or a culture is not enough for us to gain a sense of belonging” (2011, p. 370). This means that belonging is not just about being part of a social fabric, but also about “the ways in which social bonds and ties are manifested in practices, experiences and emotions of inclusion” (Anthias, 2008, p. 8).
2. Belonging as an ontological state. Here, belonging is more than fitting in or being accepted; it is something more ontological, “more fundamental to who and what we are” (Miller, 2003, p. 217), which means it constitutes our identity whether we have this feeling or not (Miller, 20...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The study of forced migrants’ emotions and belonging
• Chapter 2 Disturbed hope
• Chapter 3 Frustration and the birth of a ‘definitive’ migration plan
• Chapter 4 Emotions and self-presentation during the journey
• Chapter 5 The path to belonging: “I hope that I can start a new life ‘here’”
• Final discussion
• Index