Despite increased political and public interest in asylum issues in the UK, little has been written on the topic. This book, written by leading experts in the field, is the first to examine the role of refugee community organisations (RCOs) at a critical point of policy change.

The book is distinctive in combining theoretical discussion on the role of networks, resources and social capital with fieldwork evidence and interviews with members of RCOs, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and statutory authorities. It critically examines the impact of dispersal and current legislative change on refugee communities and RCOs; explores the integrative role of RCOs; assesses the race relations framework in Britain and its effects on refugee organisations and provides a thorough and up-to-date literature review. Refugee community organisations and dispersal is essential reading for practitioners and policy makers, academics, researchers and students of social policy, social geography, sociology and politics. Members of NGOs working with refugees or in local government, community workers and members of refugee communities themselves will also be keenly interested in the book. Comparative issues raised by the research will be of direct interest to readers in other countries.

In the past decade community groups have been portrayed as the solution to many social problems. Yet the role of ‘below the regulatory radar’ community action has received little research attention and thus is poorly understood in terms of both policy and practice. Focusing on self-organised community activity, this book offers the first collection of papers developing theoretical and empirically grounded knowledge of the informal, unregistered, yet largest, part of the voluntary sector. The collection includes work from leading academics, activists, policy makers and practitioners offering a new and coherent understanding of community action ‘below the radar’. The book is part of the Third Sector Research Series which is informed by research undertaken at the Third Sector Research Centre, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and Barrow Cadbury Trust.

European governments are now engaging in one of the largest exercises in social engineering that the continent has seen since the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and refugees in Europe are now being denied their basic right to choose where they live and are instead being compulsorily dispersed. Spreading the 'burden' is: · the first book-length study of dispersal policies; · explicitly comparative in nature and written by three national experts; · highly topical and controversial as the review of dispersal policies is under way in many countries; · a valuable case-study of how society deals with 'outsider' groups and space. The book is essential reading for national and local policy makers, those interested in human rights, social policy and refugee studies, as well as human geographers and sociologists.

This book establishes asylum seekers as a socially excluded group. It provides an overview of historic and contemporary dispersal systems, and it investigates the policy of dispersing asylum seekers across the UK and how this dispersal impacts their lives. It argues that deterrent asylum policies increase the sense of liminality experienced by individuals. The book challenges assumptions that asylum seekers should be socially excluded until they receive refugee status, and it illustrates how asylum seekers create their own sense of 'belonging' in the absence of official recognition.

Written in the temporal and political context of the British New Labour Government's ongoing reliance on the word community, academics and activists critically engage here with the range of ways in which contemporary ideas of community are being used and contested. The key focus is on understanding community from action into theory and vice versa.

Issues of asylum, migration, humanitarian protection and integration/belonging are of growing interest beyond the disciplines of refugee studies, migration, and social policy. Rooted in more than two decades of scholarship, this book uses critical social theory and the participatory, biographical and arts-based methods used with asylum seekers, refugees and emerging communities to explore the dynamics of the asylum-migration-community nexus. It argues that interdisciplinary analysis is required to deal with the complexity of the issues involved and offers understanding as praxis (purposeful knowledge), drawing on innovative research that is participatory, arts-based, performative and policy-relevant.