Erlend Paasche

Young adults of ethnic minority background on the Norwegian labour market: The interactional co-construction of exclusion by employers and customers:

Labour market participation is commonly conceptualized as an indicator of immigrant integration, although integration is not something that should be conflated with inclusion. The mere fact of employment is no silver bullet. The sociology of work needs to consider experiences of exclusion both before and after entry to the labour market. This article is based on a 25-case selection of 50 in-depth interviews that we conducted with young adults of ethnic minority background in Norway. We analyse their experiences of, and reactions to, exclusion in the labour market. While for several interviewees the possibility of being met with ethnic prejudice from employers looms large, more experiences of this sort were reported among interviewees engaged in customer contact, where the inside of an organization intersects with the outside world.

The role of corruption in reintegration: experiences of Iraqi Kurds upon return from Europe

ABSTRACT This article examines how corruption affects reintegration. The literature on return and reintegration shows that return migrants often struggle to adjust and adapt to life in their place of origin because that environment can be very different from what they grew accustomed to abroad. One stark difference is the prevalence and meaning of corruption. In many sending countries that migrants come from and then return to, corruption is endemic. By contrast, in many receiving countries that migrants go to and return from, it is incidental. Yet, we know little about how the discrepancy affects reintegration. This study examines how corruption affects the psychosocial and economic reintegration of Iraqi Kurds returning to Iraqi Kurdistan from Norway and the United Kingdom. Interviews with returnees reveal that they consider corruption a major challenge for their own reintegration. Psychosocially, it alienates them from the ideology of the Kurdish nation-building project, challenges their identities, undermines a sense of belonging and creates insecurity. Economically, it shapes economic behaviour and outcomes by obstructing entrepreneurship, producing relative deprivation and conditioning their employability.

A Conceptual and Empirical Critique of ‘Social Remittances’: Iraqi Kurdish Migrants Narrate Resistance

This chapter focuses on instances where migrants actively desire to make a social transfer, but mostly report that they cannot. The author suggests that the distinction between aspiration and ability usefully draws attention to the opportunity structure of migrants who view themselves as potential but not necessarily actual agents of change. This distinction is explored in light of how migrants relate to corruption in the country of origin. Empirically, this analysis is based primarily on 72 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Iraqi Kurdish returnees from the United Kingdom and Norway back in Iraqi Kurdistan. The analysis allows for a critical re-examination of the concept of social remittances, and for a less celebratory account of migrants’ role in the globalization of cultural politics.

Transnational Involvement: Reading Quantitative Studies in Light of Qualitative Data

Studies of migrant transnationalism are dominated by qualitative case studies. To take the field further, there is a need for more quantitative studies and for connecting quantitative and qualitative studies through a reiterative feedback loop. In order to contribute to this, we take two refined and original quantitative studies, one by Snel et al. and one by Portes et al., as a vantage point, commenting on the authors’ organization of analytical categories and their operationalization of key concepts, in light of our own, qualitative data. These data come from a research project, EUMARGINS, where we analyze processes of inclusion and exclusion of young adult immigrants and descendants in seven European countries, using participant observation and life-story interviews in combination with statistical data. We conclude that the process whereby young migrants identify themselves in terms of ethnicity and belonging is context-specific, multidimensional, and hard to study quantitatively.

The Method Makes the Manuscript: Key Texts in the Theoretical and Methodological Advancement of the Study of Civil War

The remarkable expansion in the practice of international statebuilding has generated a vast scholarly literature. Most of this work is of the ‘lessons learned’ variety: it asks why statebuilding interventions (SBIs) have failed to live up to their promises and proposes amendments. However, there is also a lively and growing critical literature which sees it as part of a ‘liberal peace project’ or an exercise in biopolitics. Two new books on the topic offer very different*and arguably more fundamental*critical analyses, and are indispensible contributions to this growing literature. David Chandler’s International Statebuilding departs from the usual pattern of criticising the effects of SBIs, instead asking a more radical question: what is the problem to which statebuilding is thought to be the solution? What understanding of ‘weak’ or ‘failed’ states are we operating with that makes statebuilding appear as a possible, indeed necessary, response? Chandler argues that ‘autonomy appears to be the problem which requires management’. That is, people in target states are thought to lack the ‘capacity’ to make sound political choices by themselves; intervention is required to build institutions, civil society and so on, to enable people to use their ‘autonomy safely and unproblematically’ (2010, p. 3). Within this paradigm, sovereignty no longer impedes intervention but necessitates it, because it implies an autonomous political space in which people may make the wrong decisions without appropriate ‘capacity-building’ (p. 45). Statebuilding thus reconfigures sovereignty from a right of non-intervention, expressing the autonomous self-determination of a political community, into a variable of technical-administrative capacity to manage autonomy in a responsible fashion (ch. 3). Similarly, as Chandler shows in a devastating case study of European Union intervention in Bosnia,