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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Refugees & political asylum
Dignity in a Teacup' chronicles the five years Christine Cummins
spent working as a torture and trauma counsellor with asylum
seekers detained on Christmas Island, Australia's remote Indian
Ocean outpost. It provides a first-hand account of Australian
immigration detention during a period of dramatic change and
controversy. With exclusive access to the stories shared by
hundreds of asylum seekers, Christine describes the reasons people
were forced to flee their homelands. These true stories are
compelling and reveal the lives of ordinary people seeking a safe
new life. It's an inspiring, intimate memoir about resilience and
the tenacity of love. This book fills the gap in our understanding
of people pursuing protection in a conflict-ridden world.
The `refugee crisis' and the recent rise of anti-immigration
parties across Europe has prompted widespread debates about
migration, integration and security on the continent. But the
perspectives and experiences of immigrants in northern and western
Europe have equal political significance for contemporary European
societies. While Turkish migration to Europe has been a vital area
of research, little scholarly attention has been paid to Turkish
migration to specifically Sweden, which has a mix of religious and
ethnic groups from Turkey and where now well over 100,000 Swedes
have Turkish origins. This book examines immigration from Turkey to
Sweden from its beginnings in the mid-1960s, when the recruitment
of workers was needed to satisfy the expanding industrial economy.
It traces the impact of Sweden's economic downturn, and the effects
of the 1971 Turkish military intervention and the 1980 military
coup, after which asylum seekers - mostly Assyrian Christians and
Kurds - sought refuge in Sweden. Contributors explore how the
patterns of labour migration and interactions with Swedish society
impacted the social and political attitudes of these different
communities, their sense of belonging, and diasporic activism. The
book also investigates issues of integration, return migration,
transnational ties, external voting and citizenship rights. Through
the detailed analysis of migration to Sweden and emigration from
Turkey, this book sheds new light on the situation of migrants in
Europe.
The Fourth Geneva Convention, signed on 12th August 1949, defines
necessary humanitarian protections for civilians during armed
conflict and occupation. One-hundred-and-ninety-six countries are
signatories to the Geneva Conventions, and this particular facet
has laid the foundations for all subsequent humanitarian global
law. How did the world - against seemingly insurmountable odds -
draft and legislate this landmark in humanitarian international
law? The Fourth Geneva Convention for Civilians draws on archival
research across seven countries to bring together the Cold War
interventions, founding motives and global idealisms that shaped
its conception. Gilad Ben-Nun draws on the three key principles
that the convention brought about to consider the recent events
where its application has either been successfully applied or
circumvented, from the 2009 Gaza War, the war crimes tribunal in
the former Yugoslavia and Nicaragua vs. the United States to the
contemporary conflict in Syria. Weaving historical archival
research, a grounding in the concepts of international law, and
insightful analysis of recent events, this book will appeal to a
broad range of students, academics and legal practitioners.
After more than seventy years, the Palestinian refugee problem
remains unsolved. But if a deal could have been reached involving
the repatriation of Palestinian refugees, it was in the early years
of the Arab-Israeli conflict. So why didn't this happen? This book
is the first comprehensive study of the international community's
earliest efforts to solve the Palestinian refugee problem. Based on
a wide range of international primary sources from Israeli, US, UK
and UN archives, the book investigates the major proposals between
1948 and 1968 and explains why these failed. It shows that the main
actors involved - the Arab states, Israel, the US and the UN -
agreed on very little when it came to the Palestinian refugees and
therefore never got seriously engaged in finding a solution. This
new analysis highlights how the international community gradually
moved from viewing the Palestinian refugee problem as a political
issue to looking at it as a humanitarian one. It examines the
impact of this development and the changes that took place in this
formative period of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as the
limited influence US policy makers had over Israel.
The Syrian Refugee Resilience Plan (SRRP) is FAO's guiding document
to support the Government of Turkey in addressing the needs of
Syrians under Temporary Protection (SuTPs) and vulnerable host
communities in Turkey. The plan is based on a holistic cooperative
approach involving a variety of actors, as well as partnerships
with the private sector and local institutions that have been the
main service providers for SuTPs and local populations. The plan is
structured around five pillars: promoting skills and knowledge for
sustainable agricultural livelihoods and food security and
nutrition; supporting employability and entrepreneurship in the
food and agriculture sector; investing in the sustainable
development of the agriculture sector and utilization of natural
resources; improving access to social protection; and managing
knowledge in the food security and agriculture sector. It aims to
directly support the resilience of more than 60 000 households
(approx. 300 000 people, of which at least 40 percent are women and
women-headed households) from Syrian and host communities in Turkey
affected by the crisis. It also includes capacity-building
initiatives for national and local government bodies,
non-governmental organizations and local institutions, such as
associations and cooperatives.
In 2014, the ethics and politics of hospitality were brought into
stark relief. Three years into the Syrian conflict, which had
already created nearly 2.5 million refugees and internally
displaced 6.5 million, the UN called on industrialised countries to
share the burden of offering hospitality through a fixed quota
system. The UK opted out of the system whilst hailing their
acceptance of a moral responsibility by welcoming only 500 of the
'most vulnerable' Syrians. Given the state's exclusionary
character, what opportunities do other spaces in international
politics offer by way of hospitality to migrants and refugees?
Hospitality can take many different forms and have many diverse
purposes. But wherever it occurs, the boundaries that enable it and
make it possible are both created and unsettled via exercises of
power and their resistance. Through modern examples including
refugee camps, global cities, postcolonial states and Europe, as
well as analysis of Derridean and Foucauldian concepts, Migration,
Ethics and Power explores: The process and practice of hospitality
The spaces that hospitality produces The intimate relationship
between ethics and power This is a brilliantly contemporary text
for students of politics, international relations and political
geography.
On a winter's day in 1943, 21-year-old Latvian Mischka Danos
chanced on a terrible sight - a pit filled with the bodies of Jews
killed by the occupying Germans. In order to escape conscription to
the Waffen-SS - the authors of such atrocities - Mischka
volunteered to go on a student exchange to Germany. He did not then
know that he was part Jewish. Whilst in Germany, he narrowly
escaped death in the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. Surviving
Hitler's Reich, he became a displaced person in occupied Germany,
where in 1951 he earned a PhD at the exceptional Heidelberg Physics
Institute. In the 1950s Mischka was sponsored as an immigrant to
the US by a Jewish survivor whom his mother, Olga, had saved during
Riga's worst period of Jewish arrests. As refugee experiences go,
Mischka was among the lucky ones - but even luck leaves scars. The
author Sheila Fitzpatrick, who met and married Mischka forty years
after these events, turns her skills as a historian and wry eye as
a memoirist to telling the remarkable story of Mischka's odyssey
and survival.
The story of Raoul Wallenberg - the Swedish businessman who, at
immense personal risk, rescued many of Budapest's Jews from the
Holocaust and subsequently disappeared into the Soviet prison
system - is one of the most fascinating episodes of World War II.
Yet the complete story of his life and fate can only be told now -
and for the first time in this book - following access to the
Russian and Swedish archival sources, previously not used. Born
into a wealthy Swedish family, Wallenberg was a moderately
successful businessman when he was recruited by the War Refugee
Board to manage the rescue mission of thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Once in Budapest, he created and distributed so called 'protective
passports' (or Schutz-Pass) among the Jewish population, thus
managing to save up to 8,000 people. Through the 'safe houses' and
clandestine networks that he established around the city, many
thousands more were saved from the concentration camps. Yet, when
Budapest was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945, Wallenberg
was arrested and taken to Moscow. One of the reasons for his arrest
was that the Soviets could not understand the nature of his
mission: formally he was a Swedish diplomat but he worked for an
American agency. On the basis of previously unseen Soviet sources,
Bengt Jangfeldt has been able to reconstruct the events surrounding
Wallenberg's arrest almost hour by hour and, for the first time, he
presents a highly plausible theory about the reasons why Wallenberg
was arrested and what happened to him after he disappeared. With
access to previously unpublished material, Jangfeldt provides the
first complete account of Wallenberg's life - from his childhood in
Sweden to his disappearance in a Russian jail - and sheds important
new light on one of the greatest heroes of World War II. This is a
thrilling tale of intrigue, espionage and heroism which will
captivate all readers of modern European history.
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