Heaven Crawley

‘Asexual, Apolitical Beings’: The Interpretation of Children's Identities and Experiences in the UK Asylum System

This article explores the experiences of separated asylum-seeking children and considers the implications of dominant understandings of ‘childhood’ for the ways in which the childrens experiences of persecution and violence are interpreted in the UK asylum system. Although there is a widely held consensus among academics that the boundaries of ‘childhood’ are socially constructed—and that this is reflected in differences in what it means to be a ‘child’ over time and across space—this understanding is largely absent from the policies and practices that constitute the asylum determination process. Children who claim asylum are constructed as passive, vulnerable, dependent, asexual and apolitical victims (usually at the hands of adults) who should be allowed to stay on a discretionary basis until they turn 18 but who are not considered deserving of, or entitled to, protection under international law. Where children assert their agency and insist that their political and sexual experiences are taken into account, this may undermine their claims to be children at all. This article draws on the accounts of separated children seeking asylum in the UK to suggest that a more nuanced and contextualised understanding of the political, social and cultural contexts from which children originate is needed to ensure that children are granted the protection they need and deserve.

Refugees, migrants, neither, both: Categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in Europe’s ‘migration crisis’

ABSTRACT The use of the categories ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ to differentiate between those on the move and the legitimacy, or otherwise, of their claims to international protection has featured strongly during Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ and has been used to justify policies of exclusion and containment. Drawing on interviews with 215 people who crossed the Mediterranean to Greece in 2015, our paper challenges this ‘categorical fetishism’, arguing that the dominant categories fail to capture adequately the complex relationship between political, social and economic drivers of migration or their shifting significance for individuals over time and space. As such it builds upon a substantial body of academic literature demonstrating a disjuncture between conceptual and policy categories and the lived experiences of those on the move. However, the paper is also critical of efforts to foreground or privilege ‘refugees’ over ‘migrants’ arguing that this reinforces rather than challenges the dichotomy’s faulty foundations. Rather those concerned about the use of categories to marginalise and exclude should explicitly engage with the politics of bounding, that is to say, the process by which categories are constructed, the purpose they serve and their consequences, in order to denaturalise their use as a mechanism to distinguish, divide and discriminate.

Migration: Refugee economics

died crossing the Mediterranean Sea. That disaster, argue migration specialist Alexander Betts and economist Paul Collier in Refuge, opened the world’s eyes to the scale of the crisis. More than 65 million people are displaced globally; some 1.4 million have crossed the Mediterranean to Europe since the start of 2015. The book’s premise is one few would deny: that the refugee system, set up after the Second World War, fails to protect or provide for those forced to migrate. Millions of refugees are left in limbo, festering in grossly underfunded camps in developing countries such as Kenya, Ethiopia and South Sudan. With no protection or socio-economic rights, particularly to work, many travel to other countries. A small proportion make the dangerous journey to Europe, Australia or the United States. Betts and Collier’s book is one of very few to provide an overarching account of how the refugee system took its current form, and the mismatch between refugees’ needs and the system’s capabilities. It is also one of the few to consider how the global approach might be reformulated. The authors call for policies to move from humanitarian assistance to development. They advocate harnessing “the remarkable opportunities of globalization” to create a win–win for developing countries that support refugees with limited resources and for rich countries struggling politically to manage migration. Refuge is self-assured, but neither its diagnosis nor its vision take us closer to a solution. Early on, Betts and Collier argue that postwar institutions such as the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR) are not keeping pace with shifts in the triggers of forced migration, from individual persecution to war and social disruption. They offer a sweeping historical and geographical account of the causes of refugee movements, cherry-picking examples. But they engage only partially with the complex political and economic realities. They attribute the growth in refugee numbers to violence and instability spurred by the end of the cold war, technological changes, resource extraction and the rise of Islamic extremism. They discuss the spread of ‘free’ elections that can legitimize oppressive regimes. But they largely omit or misrepresent the role of international politics, foreign policy, the arms trade or outside M I G R AT I O N

The politics of evidence-based policy in Europe’s ‘migration crisis’

ABSTRACT Increased migration across the Mediterranean to Europe during 2015 was associated with growing interest in generating new research evidence to assist policymakers in understanding the complexities of migration and improve policy responses. In the UK, this was reflected in funding by the Economic and Social Research Council for a Mediterranean Migration Research Programme. Drawing on evidence from the programme, this volume explores the nature of Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ and the extent to which the development of new migration management policies was grounded in evidence about the causes, drivers and consequences of migration to Europe. The authors conclude that there is a substantial ‘gap’ between the now significant body of evidence examining migration processes and European Union policy responses. This gap is attributed to three main factors: the long-standing ‘paradigm war’ in social research between positivist, interpretivist and critical approaches which means that what counts as ‘evidence’ is contested; competing knowledge claims associated with research and other forms of evidence used to construct and/or support policy narratives; and, perhaps most importantly, the politics of policymaking, which has resulted in policies based on underlying assumptions and vested interests rather than research evidence, even where this evidence is funded directly by European governments.

Gendered asylum: race and violence in US law and politics

Reformation, which took dramatically different forms in different places. This is, ultimately, a pessimistic account, anticipated by Lilienblum’s opening quote, which concludes: “Even our merits are turned into shortcomings”. This led Lilienblum from the ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) to a nationalist stance (Zionism). That is also the direction of Goldberg’s argument, which concludes with a plea for us to address these questions as a psychological issue. But since the nation state embodied the very conflict between an assumed unity of identity and purpose that excluded the Jews, and was able to do so in part by assimilating much older antisemitic ideas, we need to look for alternatives to the inheritors of these social thinkers – to the rich seam of writing on diaspora and post-colonialism by Jews and non-Jews, which simultaneously rests on, challenges and moves beyond the foundations set by Marx, Durkheim, Weber and their disciples.