Third-country education as a complementary pathway to protection is an area of refugee policy that has expanded under the Global Compact on Refugees. This paper explores the possibilities of higher (tertiary) education as a pathway to protection for Afghan students and provides an opportunity to share some personal reflections on the events of August and September 2021 in relation to Afghans set to study in the United Kingdom under the Chevening Scholarship programme, which highlights some of the challenges of using training programmes as a route to refugee protection. The authors suggest that education is a possible pathway to protection for a small subset of Afghans, in practice implementation is complex and often ad hoc, and it should not be used by Western governments as a political justification for eroding or erasing other routes to protection.

This article answers a key research question on the geopolitics of reintegration assistance, based on research in Senegal, Guinea and Morocco in 2020. Our research began by asking: Can a social-work-inspired case-management approach, provided by local mentors, improve reintegration outcomes for migrants returning to their countries of origin? We examined the role and effect of local mentors, employed as part of a pilot reintegration support project, by analysing quantitative data from reintegration sustainability surveys collected by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), triangulated with additional quantitative and qualitative data. We found that mentoring has a small but significant and positive impact on reintegration, which suggests that a further expansion of approaches at the cross-section of social work and reintegration may result in improved reintegration outcomes. Although longitudinal research, monitoring and analysis of trends across additional contexts is needed, one of the greatest promises of the pilot mentoring approach presented in this article, if improved and enhanced in the long term, could be to change the geopolitical power imbalances in reintegration planning. Enhancing the mentoring approach would mean giving more weight to local contexts and national actors and letting mentors and mentees, together, decide on what and when assistance needs to be ‘triggered’ to support them. It would take reintegration approaches a step away from the migration-management agenda of regional powers such as the European Union and a step closer to the goals of empowerment and self-determination of migrants and sending countries in the Global South.

Asylum Network Project Report

This article examines voluntariness in migration decisions by promoting the acknowledgement of forced and voluntary migration as a continuum of experience, not a dichotomy. Studies on conflict-related migration and migration, in general, remain poorly connected, despite calls for interaction. This reflects the forced–voluntary dichotomy's stickiness within and beyond academia, which is closely connected to the political implications of unsettling it and potentially undermining migrants’ protection rights. We delve into notions of the ‘voluntariness’ of migration and argue for the analytical need to relate evaluations of voluntariness to available alternatives. Drawing on qualitative research with people from Afghanistan and Pakistan coming to Europe, we hone in on three particular renderings of migration: migrants’ own experiences, scholarly qualitative observations and labelling by immigration authorities. Analysing migration as stages in a process: leaving – journey (and transit) – arrival and settlement – return or onward migration, we highlight the specific effects of migration being described as being forced or voluntary. Labelling as ‘forced’ (or not) matters to migrants and states when asylum status is on the line. For migration scholars, it remains challenging to decouple these descriptions from state systems of migration management; though doing so enhances our understanding of the role voluntariness plays in migration decisions.

Policymakers in Europe are currently under pressure to both lessen the number of incoming asylum-seekers and ‘irregular migrants’ and address the humanitarian crises occurring at Europe’s border crossings. Increasingly, we see an externalization of Europe’s border controls, as migration management policies try to stop migrants before they even arrive in Europe. One form of externalized control is information campaigns, discouraging would-be migrants and asylum-seekers from leaving their countries of origin. Such campaigns intend to inform potential migrants about the difficulties of settling in Europe and the dangers of being smuggled. As such, these campaigns aim to both discourage migration and present that discouragement as a means of protecting people from financial and bodily risk. I examine the use of information campaigns in Afghanistan, and ask why they are continued, when ethnographic work with Afghans suggests that the campaigns are unlikely to be believed. I argue that these information campaigns are symbolic, fulfilling the need of policymakers to be seen to be doing something, and also – and more ominously – serve a role of shifting responsibility for the risks of the journey onto Afghans themselves, rather than the restrictive border regimes of the EU.

States are exercising an increasing array of spatial strategies of migration control, including in the area of asylum migration. Drawing on interview data with thirty-five British and American irregular migrant and asylum support groups (MASGs), this article explores the spatial “tactics” (De Certeau 1984) employed by MASGs in response to strategies of migration control. We consider their infiltration of highly securitized physical spaces like detention centers and courts. We analyze their appropriation of control technologies and discuss their exploitation of inconsistencies within the neoliberalization of controls. These tactics highlight the importance of resistive actions that are carried out “within enemy territory” (De Certeau 1984, 37). As such, they represent a complementary set of actions to more radical forms of protest and consequently enrich our understanding of the diversity of forms of resistance.

In 2010 the British government announced that the outrage of child detention for immigration purposes was to end. Simultaneously, however, it commissioned the opening of a new family detention centre called CEDARS. An acronym for Compassion, Empathy, Dignity, Approachability, Respect and Support, CEDARS is run under novel governance arrangements by the Home Office, private security company G4S and the children’s charity Barnardo’s. This article draws on focus group research with migrant advocacy groups, to examine the ways in which Barnardo’s’ role within CEDARS is variously imagined as mitigating and/or legitimating the use of detention as a border control mechanism. In particular we ask: what are the consequences of the co-option of charities and voluntary organisations within the immigration detention market? Has the neoliberal trend towards the ‘professionalisation of dissent’ diminished political opposition to immigration detention in Britain and the wider world?1 Has humanitarian activism on behalf of migrants (unintentionally) contributed to the exponential growth of for-profit migrant detention markets?

Within the context of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), academic labor is being tagged to ‘impact’: to demonstrable outputs that go beyond academia and benefit “the wider economy and society” (HEFCE, 2009, 13; see also Rogers et al., this issue). This move is certainly not new, nor is it unique to institutions of higher education in the UK. ‘Impact statements’ have been standard in funding proposals for quite a while, grant funded projects have long required evidence of application within the communities where research occurs and, in the US, ‘service’ to institutional, professional, and broader communities is well established as one of the metrics used in governing promotion and tenure processes.
In this intervention, we reflect on our experience working on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project where questions of impact – understood as efforts to engage participants and to produce applied results – were an ongoing concern. We offer a vision that recognizes that producing impact in research is a complicated process where alternatives to what some describe as the “wholesale neoliberalization of knowledge production” (Jazeel, 2010, np) might potentially be realized. More specifically, we offer an allegorical rendering of impact as odyssey.

This article explores the interactions between transnational activities (in the form of return visits) and integration, for Afghan refugees living in the USA. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in California and Kabul the study looks at why return visits take place and the difficult experiences Afghan-Americans had of being a stranger in what might otherwise be considered their 'home'. It is argued that return visits can be a transnational strategy instrumentalized to contribute to integration in California through, for example, the investment of 'reverse' remittances. In doing so, the importance of multi-directional transnational flows, particularly those from Afghanistan to the USA, are highlighted.

In this article, we explore ways of understanding the interactions between migrant integration and transnationalism, based on a review of quantitative and qualitative literature. Integration is taken as the starting point, and the assumption that integration and transnationalism are at odds with one another is questioned. When considered as constituents of a social process, we argue that there are many similarities between integration and transnationalism. A typology for understanding these interactions is developed, based on an acknowledgment of migrants’ agency in straddling two societies—as a balancing act. This typology is presented as a tool to enable migration scholars to move beyond simply acknowledging the co-existence of transnationalism and integration and towards an analysis of the nature of interactions between the two—understood in relation both to particular places and contexts and to the human beings involved and their functional, emotional and pragmatic considerations.

Researchers and policymakers have limited understanding of how conflicts overseas affect UK communities, aside from when substantial flows of asylum seekers and migrants from conflict regions occur. Yet globalisation has intensified and changed UK communities’ international connections. This research studies the impact on UK communities of three areas of conflict: Afghanistan/Pakistan, the Great Lakes region of Africa, and the Western Balkans.

As our world becomes 'smaller', how do governments and citizens manage and react to migration and settlement? This book explores themes such as: rights and laws - freedom of movement across borders, human rights, seeking asylum, and immigration controls; the different types of migrants; and coping with migration.