Refugee Protection And Civil Society In Europe

This volume analyses civil society as an important factor in the European refugee regime. Based on empirical research, the chapters explore different aspects, structures and forms of civil society engagement during and after 2015. Various institutional, collective and individual activities are examined in order to better understand the related processes of refugees’ movements, reception and integration. Several chapters also explore the historical development of the relationship between a range of actors involved in solidarity movements and care relationships with refugees across different member states. Through the combined analysis of macro-level state and European policies, meso-level organization's activities and micro-level individual behaviour, Refugee Protection and Civil Society in Europe presents a comprehensive exploration of the refugee regime in motion, and will be of interest to scholars and students researching migration, social movements, European institutions and social work.

Ludger Pries explores the important moral, social and political challenge facing Europe and the international community: the protection of refugees as one of the most vulnerable groups on the planet.

The crisis of forced displacement is compounded by the politicization of asylum and refugee protection, which have become polarizing issues in many countries in Europe and in the United States. It has animated efforts by pro-refugee civil society groups to engage in advocacy efforts that respond to the securitization of the issue, reframe it as a human rights and humanitarian issue, and bring about policies that are favorable to refugee protection. The contrasting points of view surrounding refugee and asylum policy reveal a fundamental normative difference in what is considered the most appropriate standard of behavior to guide actions and policies in the wake of the European refugee crisis. This normative difference, and the contestation that it entails, represents the starting point for this study of specific strategies of norm-based change. The study focuses on civil society organizations (CSOs) and the deliberate ways they incorporate and use norms in framing and responding to the issue of refugee protection. It seeks to understand and explain how and why pro-refugee advocacy groups choose to use specific norm-based strategies of advocacy in their effort to shift public opinion on the issues of asylum and refugee protection and ultimately bring about policy change.

Inclusive Solidarity and Citizenship along Migratory Routes in Europe and the Americas links non-essentialist concepts of solidarity and citizenship to migration in different empirical contexts. The chapters in this edited volume analyse how civil society initiatives renegotiate societal structures in solidarity with people on the move, noncitizens and racialized individuals, and in doing so advance theorizing and contribute to current debates about citizenship and solidarity. Focusing on solidarity among members of the so-called ‘majority society’ in Europe and the Americas, this book offers a compendium of chapters that analyses particular practices of solidarity – both material and symbolic – as well as the mindsets, discourses, and broader societal contexts that provide the fundament of these practices. As these empirical cases demonstrate, the main argument of the book is that solidarity is not necessarily based on a pre-established and exclusive community, but that more inclusive solidarities arise through collective practices, the emergence of new subjectivities, and the mediation of differences. Furthermore, the book argues that it is analytically fruitful to associate concepts of citizenship with solidarity by proposing the concept of ‘solidarity citizenship’ in order to bring into view societal modes of relating that are constitutive of collective as well as individual subjectivities. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Citizenship Studies.

New forms of solidarity are being shaped as a response to the European “refugee crisis.” The state—in the form of national governments—has not been able to implement any viable or sustainable solution to the crisis, but the solidarity movement has been very visible and active in European countries. This book offers a conceptualization of three types of solidarity: autonomous, civic, and institutional solidarity. This framework is applied to three case studies, illustrating the emergence of different forms of solidarity: the City Plaza Hotel in Athens, the Danish “friendly neighbors,” and Barcelona as refuge city.

This book examines the ‘European refugee crisis’, offering an in-depth comparative analysis of how public attitudes towards refugees and humanitarian dispositions are shaped by political news coverage. An international team of authors address the role of the media in contesting solidarity towards refugees from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Focusing on the public sphere, the book follows the assumption that solidarity is a social value, political concept and legal principle that is discursively constructed in public contentions. The analysis refers systematically and comparatively to eight European countries, namely, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Treatment of data is also original in the way it deals with variations of public spheres by combining a news media claims-making analysis with a social media reception analysis. In particular, the book highlights the prominent role of the mass media in shaping national and transnational solidarity, while exploring the readiness of the mass media to extend thick conceptions of solidarity to non-members. It proposes a research design for the comparative analysis of online news reception and considers the innovative potential of this method in relation to established public opinion research. The book is of particular interest for scholars who are interested in the fields of European solidarity, migration and refugees, contentious politics, while providing an approach that talks to scholars of journalism and political communication studies, as well as digital journalism and online news reception. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book presents an overview of European migration policy and the various institutional arrangements within and between various actors, such as local councils, local media, local economies, and local civil society initiatives. Both the role of local authorities in this policy field and their cooperation with civil society initiatives or networks are under-explored topics for research. In response, this book provides a range of detailed case studies focusing on the six main groups of national and administrative traditions in Europe: Germanic, Scandinavian, Napoleonic, Southeastern European, Central-Eastern European and Anglo-Saxon.

This book provides a comparative overview of asylum seekers’ reception throughout Europe by adopting a theoretical framework based on an analytical approach to the notion of multilevel governance (MLG). It challenges the tendency of the MLG literature to overlook political controversies and conflicts and questions the assumption that it represents the best policymaking arrangement for promoting policy convergence. In doing so, it explores the functioning of the reception component of the Common European Asylum System in centralised states and federal/regional states and analyses its implementation at both national and local levels. The book reveals the heterogeneous development of reception policies not only across Member States but also within each country where solutions adopted at the local level generally diverge substantially. Furthermore, the overall centralisation of policy-making on reception regardless the institutional structure, seems to leave little room for MLG arrangements tailored to specific localities and triggers tensions between central governments and local authorities. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of migration and asylum studies, immigration, (multilevel) global governance and more broadly to comparative politics, European studies/politics and public policy. Chapter 3, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.