Young Refugees and Forced Displacement is about young Syrian and Iraqi refugees navigating the complex realities of forced displacement in Beirut. It is based on a British Academy funded two-year project with 51 displaced youths aged 8 to 17 and under the care of three local humanitarian organisations. Focus groups, interviews and innovative arts-based methods were used to learn about their everyday lives. At the end of the project, we coproduced with them a public mural, allowing unexpected epistemological and methodological reflections on researching refugees and the "right to opacity." Families and friendships, humanitarian caregiving, racism, discrimination and everyday decencies and civilities make up the stuff of their ordinary, everyday encounters within refugeedom, defining both its sharper edges and its more inadvertent and quietly political ones. Thus, refugeedom, as we conceive it, includes "the humanitarian condition" but goes a little beyond it, to become also a human condition of political alterity. In navigating refugeedom, the young Syrians and Iraqis become sophisticated political and moral actors, using emotional reflexivity as they engage layered subjectivities to define the terms of their own forced displacement. This book will be of interest to policymakers, humanitarian organisations, social science scholars and students working on refugees, displacement, humanitarianism, intimacies and emotions, racism and discrimination. It may also be of interest to displaced youth.

This book responds to the reality that children and youth constitute a disproportionately large percentage of displaced populations worldwide. It demonstrates how their hopes and aspirations reflect the transient nature of their age group, and often differ from those of their elders. It also examines how they face additional difficulties due to the inconsistent definition and uneven implementation of the traditional ‘durable solutions’ to forced migration implemented by national governments and international assistance agencies. The authors use empirical research findings and robust policy analyses of cases of child displacement across the globe to make their central argument: that the particular challenges and opportunities that displaced children and youth face must be investigated and factored into relevant policy and practice, promoting more sustainable and durable solutions in the process. This interdisciplinary edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of forced migration studies, development, conflict and peace-building and youth studies, along with policy-makers, children's rights organizations and NGOs.

As unprecedented numbers of unaccompanied African minors requested asylum in Europe in 2015, Annika Lems witnessed a peculiar dynamic: despite inclusionary language in official policy and broader society, these children faced a deluge of exclusionary practices in the classroom and beyond. Frontiers of Belonging traces the educational paths of refugee youth arriving in Switzerland amid the shifting sociopolitical terrain of the refugee crisis and the underlying hierarchies of deservingness. Lems reveals how these minors sought protection and support, especially in educational settings, but were instead treated as threats to the economic and cultural integrity of Switzerland. Each chapter highlights a specific child's story—Jamila, Meron, Samuel, and more—as they found themselves left out, while on paper being allowed "in." The result is a highly ambiguous social reality for young refugees, resulting in stressful, existential balancing acts. A captivating ethnography, Frontiers of Belonging allows readers into the Swiss classrooms where unspoken distinctions between self and other, guest and host, refugee and resident, were formed, policed, and challenged.

Refugee and Forced Migration Studies has grown from being a concern of a relatively small number of scholars and policy researchers in the 1980s to a global field of interest with thousands of students worldwide studying displacement either from traditional disciplinary perspectives or as a core component of newer programmes across the Humanities and Social and Political Sciences. Today the field encompasses both rigorous academic research which may or may not ultimately inform policy and practice, as well as action-research focused on advocating in favour of refugees' needs and rights. This authoritative Handbook critically evaluates the birth and development of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, and analyses the key contemporary and future challenges faced by academics and practitioners working with and for forcibly displaced populations around the world. The 52 state-of-the-art chapters, written by leading academics, practitioners, and policymakers working in universities, research centres, think tanks, NGOs and international organizations, provide a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the key intellectual, political, social and institutional challenges arising from mass displacement in the world today. The chapters vividly illustrate the vibrant and engaging debates that characterize this rapidly expanding field of research and practice.

The global refugee crisis is staggering in scope. The United Nations Refugee Agency reported that 79.5 million people were displaced worldwide in 2019, and over half of all displaced persons were under eighteen. As the number of children and teenagers seeking asylum continues to grow, the impact of displacement on a young person’s well-being and development over the long term requires further study. In Finding Safe Harbour Emily Pelley investigates the current response to refugee youth in Canada by highlighting how Halifax, Nova Scotia, as a mid-sized urban centre, has mobilized services and resources to support young people seeking refuge. Opening with a broad contextual introduction to the global crisis of displacement and the impact of violence and armed conflict on young people, Pelley focuses on the reciprocal adaptation that is required for the long-term integration of displaced youth into the receiving society. A concise and illuminating study on refugee resettlement, Finding Safe Harbour concludes with an in-depth discussion of how cities can optimize resilience resources through meaningful engagement with refugee youth.

Recent years have witnessed a significant growth of interest in the consequences of political violence and displacement for the young. However, when speaking of "children" commentators have often taken the situation of those in early and middle childhood as representative of all young people under eighteen years of age. As a consequence, the specific situation of adolescents negotiating the processes of transition towards social adulthood amidst conditions of violence and displacement is commonly overlooked. Years of Conflict provides a much-needed corrective. Drawing upon perspectives from anthropology, psychology, and media studies as well as the insights of those involved in programmatic interventions, it describes and analyses the experiences of older children facing the challenges of daily life in settings of conflict, post-conflict and refuge. Several authors also reflect upon methodological issues in pursuing research with young people in such settings. The accounts span the globe, taking in Liberia, Afghanistan, South Africa, Peru, Jordan, UK/Western Europe, Eastern Africa, Iran, USA, and Colombia. This book will be invaluable to those seeking a fuller understanding of conflict and displacement and its effects upon adolescents. It will also be welcomed by practitioners concerned to develop more effective ways of providing support to this group. Jason Hart is a Senior Research Officer at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford.