leaders. Though, the multifaceted nature of the ‘migration crisis’ – and the polysemy of a designation that encompasses humanitarian, security, economic and identity concerns – made the identification of the most appropriate response strategy a highly divisive question across Europe. Taking this inherent ambiguity as a starting point for our investigation, our contribution re-traces the processes that have
. If humanitarian certainties have been upended, it is not in Sri Lanka, or even Syria or Afghanistan, but in the NGO response to the migration crisis in Greece and in the Mediterranean. For here, whether they like it or not, when they rescue people at sea who are trying to get to Europe, relief NGOs are involved not just in caritative work, whose deontology is relatively straightforward ethically; here, they are important actors in a profound political struggle, whose outcome, along with the response or non-response to climate change, is likely to
In this interview, Caroline Abu Sa’Da, General Director of SOS MEDITERRANEE Suisse, discusses search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea, in particular those conducted by her organisation. She explains that as a European citizen movement, SOS MEDITERRANEE has adopted a hybrid and politicised approach, which represents a new kind of humanitarian engagement. And she reflects on the challenges of protecting and supporting those crossing the Mediterranean.
diversity and appropriate formats have also been identified as communicative challenges for humanitarian monitoring and evaluation in South Sudan, especially the ‘large number of national languages spoken and low literacy rates’ ( Steets et al. , 2016 : 28). Research on Greece’s migration crisis has illustrated a need for similar considerations. It has shown, too, that links between language and ICT innovations are complex. For instance, findings based on surveys with 202
mechanism to deal with domestic political issues (see Chapter 7 , this volume). Hence, from the migration crisis in the Balkans that opened the possibility for a normative EU foreign policy to the migration crisis of 2015 that closed this window, the EU has come full circle (see Chapter 8 , this volume). Thus, it is no accident that ‘crisis’ discourses have supplanted peacebuilding, rights, democratisation and development
Given the significant similarities and differences between the welfare states of Northern Europe and their reactions to the perceived 'refugee crisis' of 2015, the book focuses primarily on the three main cases of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. Placed in a wider Northern European context – and illustrated by those chapters that also discuss refugee experiences in Norway and the UK – the Danish, Swedish and German cases are the largest case studies of this edited volume. Thus, the book contributes to debates on the governance of non-citizens and the meaning of displacement, mobility and seeking asylum by providing interdisciplinary analyses of a largely overlooked region of the world, with two specific aims. First, we scrutinize the construction of the 2015 crisis as a response to the large influx of refugees, paying particular attention to the disciplinary discourses and bureaucratic structures that are associated with it. Second, we investigate refugees’ encounters with these bureaucratic structures and consider how these encounters shape hopes for building a new life after displacement. This allows us to show that the mobility of specific segments of the world’s population continues to be seen as a threat and a risk that has to be governed and controlled. Focusing on the Northern European context, our volume interrogates emerging policies and discourses as well as the lived experiences of bureaucratization from the perspective of individuals who find themselves the very objects of bureaucracies.
ongoing ‘war on migrants’ is too often framed as a humanitarian emergency: these are some of the images we usually associate with the so-called ‘migration crisis’. 1 Nevertheless, this ‘crisis’ is neither new nor exceptional, especially when viewed through a historical lens. This discourse of an allegedly uncontrolled ‘invasion’ of Europe dates back to the 1990s when the alarming image was first used particularly in the
as the top priority for the EU in its relations with this part of the neighbourhood, a trend reconfirmed after the 2015 migration crisis and the series of terrorist attacks in Europe. That is not to say that other concerns have been completely abandoned. There is still the explicit ambition of tackling the root causes of migration and conflict in this region, but the integration agenda has been generally abandoned as a
). Local ownership A third virtue for the successful implementation of the integrated approach to conflicts and crises is ‘local ownership’. This principle ensures that local concerns and needs are at the heart of conflict management and peacebuilding. In Libya, the prompt and top-down actions that the EU took to tackle Libya’s ‘migration crisis’, seemed not to reflect principles of participatory
violence of welfare bureaucracies Malkki, L. (1996). ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology 11(3), pp. 377–404. Masocha, S. (2015). Asylum Seekers, Social Work and Racism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Moore, K., Berry, M. and Garcia-Blanco, I. (2018). ‘Saving Refugees or Policing the Seas? How the National Press of Five EU Member States Framed News Coverage of the Migration Crisis’, Justice, Power and Resistance 2(1), pp. 66–95. Parker, S. (2015). ‘“Unwanted Invaders”: The Representation of Refugees and Asylum