Multiple refugee regimes govern the lives of forced migrants simultaneously but in an often conflicting way. As a mechanism of inclusion/exclusion, they tend to engender the violence they sought to dissipate. Protection and control channel agency through mechanisms of either tutelage and victimisation or criminalisation. This book contrasts multiple groups of refugees and refugee regimes, revealing the inherent coercive violence of refugee regimes, from displacement and expulsion, to stereotypification and exclusion in host countries, and academic knowledge essentialisation. This violence is international, national, society-based, internalised, and embodied - and it urgently needs due scholarly attention.

This book examines the origins and evolution of refugee protection over the past four centuries.

In/Visibility is unequally distributed in society and closely related to the distribution of power and privilege. Using images and narratives to mobilize is part of political strategies. The relationship of in/visibility and migration is the guiding question for this edited volume. The chapters discuss multidisciplinary perspectives and factors that contribute to the visibility of forced migration beyond a policy-centered discourse. They focus on the voices and agency of refugees in different countries and contexts. By including research, practical experiences and artistic methods, the volume will be of interest to readers from different academic disciplines and the arts as well as to practitioners.

This book argues that the international refugee regime and its ‘temporary’ humanitarian interventions have failed. Most refugees across the global live in ‘protracted’ conditions that extend from years to decades, without legal status that allows them to work and establish a home. It is contended that they become largely invisible to people based in the global North, and cease to remain fully human subjects with access to their political lives. Shifting the conversation away from the salient discourse of ‘solutions’ and technical fixes within state-centric international relations, the authors recover the subjectivity lost for those stuck in extended exile. The book first argues that humanitarian assistance to refugees remains vital to people’s survival, even after the emergency phase is over. It then connects asylum politics in the global North with the intransigence of extended exile in the global South. By placing the urgent crises of protracted exile within a broader constellation of power relations, both historical and geographical, the authors present research and empirical findings gleaned from refugees in Iran, Kenya and Canada and from humanitarian and government workers. Each chapter reveals patterns of power circulating through the ‘colonial present’, Cold War legacies, and the global ‘war on terror". Seeking to render legible the more quotidian struggles and livelihoods of people who find themselves defined as refugees, this book will be of great interest to international humanitarian agencies, as well as migration and refugee researchers, including scholars in refugee studies and human displacement, human security, globalization, immigration, and human rights.

The displaced are often rendered silent and invisible as they journey in search of refuge. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples from Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, Iraq, Syria, UK, Germany, France, the Balkan Peninsula, US, Canada, Australia, and Kenya, the contributions to this volume draw attention to refugees, asylum seekers, exiles, and forced migrants as individual subjects with memories, hopes, needs, rights, and a prospective place in collective memory. The book's wide-ranging theoretical, literary, artistic, and autobiographical contributions appeal to scholarly and lay readers who share concerns about the fate of the displaced in relation to the emplaced in this age of mass mobility.

This book examines the politics of making and unmaking refugees at various scales by probing the contradictions between the principles of international statecraft, which focus on the national/state level approach in regulating global forced displacement, and the forces that defy this state-based approach. It explores the ways by which the current global refugee categorizes and excludes millions of people who need protection. The investigations in this book move beyond the state scale to draw attention to the finer scales of displacement and forced mobility in the various, complex spaces of migration and asylum. By bringing refugees stories to the forefront, the chapters in this volume highlight diasporic activism and applaud the corresponding ingenuity and tenacity. This book also builds upon debates on the critical geopolitical understandings of states, displacement and bordering to advance theoretical understandings of refugee regimes as a critical geopolitical issue. With this collection, the contributors invite a more sustained conversation that draws attention to and focusses on the current global refugee crisis and the violence of exclusion of that same regime. This highly engaging and informative volume will be of interest to policymakers, academics and students concerned with global migration, refugee governance and crises. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

A heartbreaking, full-color graphic novel of the refugee drama In the French port town of Calais, famous for its historic lace industry, a city within a city arose. This new town, known as the Jungle, was home to thousands of refugees, mainly from the Middle East and Africa, all hoping, somehow, to get to the UK. Into this squalid shantytown of shipping containers and tents, full of rats and trash and devoid of toilets and safety, the artist Kate Evans brought a sketchbook and an open mind. Combining the techniques of eyewitness reportage with the medium of comic-book storytelling, Evans has produced this unforgettable book, filled with poignant images—by turns shocking, infuriating, wry, and heartbreaking. Accompanying the story of Kate’s time spent among the refugees—the insights acquired and the lives recounted—is the harsh counterpoint of prejudice and scapegoating arising from the political right. Threads addresses one of the most pressing issues of modern times to make a compelling case, through intimate evidence, for the compassionate treatment of refugees and the free movement of peoples. Evans’s creativity and passion as an artist, activist, and mother shine through.