Publikationstyp: Herausgabe Special Issue 3
Post-2015 refugees in Germany: “Culture of welcome”, solidarity or exclusion?
AutorInnen: Yanaşmayan, Zeynep Publikationsjahr: 2023
This special issue project was conceived at a time when Germany has prominently come to the fore during the “summer of migration” in 2015 assuming a leading role in European asylum reception system. The German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) registered more than one million asylum applications in 2015 and 2016 (BAMF, 2019:5) when Dublin regulations were temporarily lifted to enable the arrival of mostly Syrian forced migrants fleeing the civil war and the oppression of the Assad regime. In a cruel twist of fate, at the time of the writing of this introduction, Germany undergoes a similar process of reception of forced migrants from Ukraine seeking shelter/protection away from the Russian aggression. While the legal framework put in place differs widely, lessons that can be drawn from the “summer of migration” remain crucial to tackle the current situation.
This requires obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the arrivals in 2015 and thereafter. This special issue aims to contribute to the growing body of scholarship by reading the situation of post-2015 refugees through the lens of exclusion that is conceived as interlocking and co-existing with processes of inclusion. The approach taken here relies chiefly on the broader framework developed within the context of a large project funded by the Max Planck Societyi (see Foblets et al., 2018; Foblets & Yanaşmayan, 2022; Hruschka & Schader, 2020). Building on the concept of “differential inclusion” (Baban et al., 2017; De Genova et al., 2014) that describes how inclusion can be subject to varying degrees of “subordination, discrimination and segmentation”, the proposition of this special issue is to expand the focus on how different acts of exclusion, not limited to the topographical bordering practices and governance tools, by state as well as non-state actors can hinder access to the territory, to rights claims as well as to needed resources in different areas and ultimately prevent full participation. Significantly, this lens of exclusion intrinsically encompasses an attention to migrants' practices of resistance and solidarity, which further posits exclusion as ambiguous, temporally bounded and sphere-dependent.
In order to document the variety of acts of and resistance against exclusion, the special issue brings together a multidisciplinary team of scholars in the fields of geography, anthropology, law, urban studies, sociology and political science, all working with original empirical data, collected in interviews, observations, surveys, laws and policy documents. This special issue sheds light on this historical critical juncture in European migration history that had become quintessentially associated with a “crisis” rhetoric (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018; Triandafyllidou, 2017) that produced highly volatile and shifting representations of migrants (Holzberg et al., 2018; Vollmer & Karakayali, 2018). Against the background of this prevailing “crisis” discourse, the contributions of this special issue tease out three essential topics that remain relevant for the refugee reception at large: (1) legal (un)certainty, (2) accommodation and housing and (3) societal responses.
doi: 10.1111/imig.13149 ISSN: 0020-7985 Open Access