To mark the Refugee Week 2021 Studies in Ethnicity Nationalism have put together a special collection of articles available free to read for 1 month. The collection includes articles published in SEN since 2020 and beyond. They cover various theoretical and empirical aspects of the intersection between migration, human security, ethnicity, race and national identities.
Exploring the Victimization of Syrian Refugees through the Human Security Model: An Ethnographic Approach
Authors: Arif Akgul, Cuneyt Gurer, Hasan Aydin
Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to investigate the human security aspect of the Syrian refugee crisis and to analyse the vulnerability and victimization of Syrian refugees in Turkey. Among the several categories within the human security model (i.e. economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political) as conceptualized by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the study analysed the personal (i.e. individual) security of Syrian refugees in Turkey. A qualitative research design was employed with an applied ethnographic approach which included semi-structured interviews, observations, document analysis, and field notes. Five main themes were identified regarding the personal security of Syrians: violence, homelessness, prostitution and early marriage, child labour, and deadly journeys. The results of the study indicate that Syrian refugees are exposed to several human insecurity parameters at the individual level, which are largely neglected by the Turkish state. Consequently, Turkey’s failure to promote the human security of the Syrian refugees contributes to their forced migration to Western countries, where ‘freedom from fear’, ‘freedom from want’, and ‘freedom from indignity’ are relatively assured.
First-Generation Refugees’ Rejection of Racial Self-Identification in South Africa: Constructing Non-Racial Identifications
Author: Amanuel Isak Tewolde
Abstract:
Although racial classification in South Africa has been extensively studied by scholars, little is known about the extent to which post-apartheid refugees or immigrants reject the South African racial classification system. In particular, there is scant research on Eritrean refugees’ self-identification patterns within the racially structured South African host society. The current study addresses this lacuna by exploring how first-generation Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers, who originate from an ethno-linguistically structured social system, self-identify. Semi-structured interviews with 46 participants were conducted. Largely, those who lived in isolated Eritrean ethnic communities rejected identifying by race and instead self-classified by identities they were familiar with in their home country. The results reported here form only part of a larger study that identified various themes. Four themes were identified in relation to this paper’s specific research question: (1) identifying as human; (2) identifying as Eritrean; (3) identifying as Habesha; and (4) identifying as Tigrinya. The paper argues that non-acculturated and residentially and ethnically isolated individual refugees in South Africa eschew South Africa’s racial classification system. The resistance to racialization by new refugees might hold potential for transforming the country’s entrenched racial classification system based on Black, White, Coloured, and Indian categories as the social demographics of South Africa change in response to immigration.
Protection by whom, for whom? Muslim refugee women facing a contested European identity
Author: Lara-Zuzan Golesorkhi
Abstract:
The protection of the ‘European way of life’ has come at the expense of protecting the human rights of migrants. This trade-off has occurred at border crossings and in host countries, and has left third-country nationals, including Muslim refugee women, in grey areas of protection. How can we explain these limited protections across the EU? I argue that the limited protections of Muslim refugee women can be explained through a combination of the EU’s fragmented non-discrimination framework and surging nationalist dynamics. By using Germany as my case study and by drawing on ethnographic research, I propose that Muslim refugee women have been securitized through three distinct but connected ‘threat logics’: refugees as threat, Muslims and Islam as threat, and Muslim women as threat. All three threat logics have been employed by nationalist and right-wing groups to simultaneously target migration and Islam qua Muslim refugee women.
The Refugee: Forging National Identities
Author: Emma Haddad
Abstract:
Refugees are the side-effect of the creation of separate nation-states, moreover of nation-states that have failed to enforce a system of substantive sovereignty that would ensure the protection of all their citizens.Sovereignty is not merely an empty concept, but entails the duty to represent and protect all those who fall within the sovereign jurisdiction of the state; a failure of the sovereign to fulfil these duties has the potential to produce refugees. Refugees are therefore anomalies in the system of nation-states and challenge the assumption that all individuals belong to a territory. Indeed refugees do not fit into the citizen-state-territory trinity, but are forced, instead, into the gaps between nation-states. Accordingly refugees pose a problem for the international community quite different from that of other foreigners.