A controversy exists in the historiography of ethnic German post-WWII refugees and expellees who lived in the German Democratic Republic. This question is namely: to what extent were these refugees and expellees from various countries with differing cultural, religious, social and economic backgrounds integrated into GDR society? Were they absorbed by the native cultures of the GDR? Was an amalgamation of both native and expellee cultures created? Or did the expellees keep themselves isolated and separate from GDR society? The historiography regarding this controversy most commonly uses Soviet and SED governmental records from 1945-53. The limitation of this approach by historians is that it has told the refugee and expellee narrative from government officials’ perspectives rather than those of the Resettlers themselves. In 1953 the SED regime stopped public record keeping concerning the Resettlers declaring their integration into GDR society as complete. After eight years in the GDR did the Resettlers feel that they were an integrated part of society? In an attempt to ascertain how Resettlers perceived their own pasts in the GDR and the level of integration that occurred, 230 refugees and expellees were interviewed throughout the former GDR between 2008-09. These interviewees represented several homeland origin groups and lived in a variety of localities including small, rural villages; middle-sized, established towns; and huge industrial centers. The results of these interviews have been analyzed in conjunction with primary archival sources and the secondary literature.

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This study provides a response to current controversies in postcolonial studies. While recent interventions have proposed a rerouting or reconstruction of the postcolonial, this research argues that the postcolonial could be redefined as a form of custodianship. Indeed, this notion has not yet been recognised as such, but it has always been a central issue in postcolonial criticism. It has been adopted to portray the postcolonial intellectual as "custodian" or doorkeeper, in the derogatory sense of someone who claims to represent the essence of a culture. Yet custodianship does not correspond to the authority of cultural representation. Instead, it might be the fidelity to an ethical imperative, a responsibility for the other in forms of cultural and literary inheritance. For this reason, it is not something that needs to be formulated as an abstract theory, but rather it can be learned as a practice through the reading of literary and poetic forms. The aesthetic of custodianship presented in this research detects modes of transmission in the figurative, rather than strictly thematic aspects of canonical and non-canonical postcolonial literary objects. The thesis engages with influential postcolonial authors: Anita Desai, Mahasweta Devi, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Arundhati Roy, and a young tribal artist, Bhajju Shyam, whose work has received no extensive attention in the postcolonial discourse. This inquiry illustrates that the postcolonial has addressed, and continues to address, a crucial problematic about how to transmit, to read and to inherit, not only one's own tradition, but also legacies of the other. The postcolonial could still be relevant today as an aesthetic of custodianship, that is, as an understanding of literature itself as a practice of poetic transmission able to weave figuration and worldliness in a common ground.

This thesis undertakes an examination and articulation of the colonial dynamics of Settler people, collectives, societies, and nations in the settler colonial northern bloc. It is geographically situated, demonstrating that settler colonialism transforms spaces and claims places in powerful, consistent ways, leaving observable patterns across five centuries and a vast continent. Canadian and American citizens today are revealed to be much like their trans-Atlantic forbears, while even radically-transformative Settler social movements are shown to often leave colonial structures and legacies intact. This project constitutes a preliminary search for libratory, decolonising potentiality within Settler understandings of place, currently situated in the framework of settler colonialism and other forms of colonising, expansive powers, each possessed of distinct geographical imaginations. The goal of this project is to render visible long-standing dynamics at the root of on-going colonisation, situating collective Settler relationships as the primary location of settler colonisation in the northern bloc. This is not intended as an accusation, but as a creative deconstruction: revealing the intimate workings of settler colonialism and identifying the inherent weaknesses and contradictions in colonial spaces is the necessary first step in fundamental decolonisation of the people and places of the northern bloc.

This thesis explores refugee experiences of integration, applying a theoretical approach informed by Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of capital and habitus. The theoretical framework is empirically applied to a small social network of Burundian refugees living in Birmingham, UK. Narrative interviews, including a visual method, are employed to explore the lived experience of integration. A critical overview of existing literature highlights the need for qualitative research that considers the relationships between structure and agency, and highlights the linkages between integration domains whilst emphasising social and cultural practices. It also posits a critical perspective that emphasises conflict, for which Bourdieu's framework is ideal. The process whereby refugees translate and transfer capital and habitus between country of origin and reception is analysed. The respondents' experiences demonstrate that some forms of capital are translatable whilst others are not due to discordance in habitus, the complexities of changing cultures and class positions, and the constraints of racism and discrimination. Certain forms of capital are either absent or have been subject to a process of devaluation. However, many of these refugees maintain their (fairly privileged) class habitus and have high hopes for the future. They continue struggling to rebuild their symbolic and material status: for them a central feature of integration.

This study assumes that the sustainable development of Somali Diaspora Community relies on the sustainability leadership practised by the co-ordinators of the Somali Community Organisations (SCOs). The SCOs were initially established to help the new Somali migrants to settle in the UK. The SCOs offered advocacy, information and guidance services. The Somali Diaspora Community still uses the services offered by the SCOs. However, lack of experience of running SCOs and clan allegiances weakened the SCO co-ordinators’ capacity to run inclusive and progressive services. The Somali Diaspora Community population in the UK is estimated to be over 200,000 of which 50% live in London. They are served by over 130 SCOs across London with three to four divided and uncooperative SCOs in each borough council. This study suggests that if SCO co-ordinators are trained and equipped with sustainability leadership capacities, they will be in a better position to lead the process to sustainability. The main objective of this study is to check the preparedness of the SCO co-ordinators to participate in a tailor-made training programme that, as the Centre for Excellence in Leadership (CEL, 2007:10) suggested, provides them with “the skills, knowledge and qualities to lead and support sustainable development”. The main question of the study is “How are transformed transformative SCO co-ordinators possible?” ii To answer this question, the extended literature review covers the modern history of Somalia, the Diaspora concept, the formation of SCOs, Education for Sustainability and community development. This is combined with the reflection of the SCO co-ordinators on their geo-historical move from Somalia to the UK, the formation of the SCOs and their view of the future of the SCOs. The result of their reflection was analysed with the application of the four terms (1M, 2E, 3L and 4D) of dialectical critical realism and the three terms (5A, 6R and 7A) of the philosophy of meta-reality. The discussion of the findings led to the development of a retroductive model (based on the Transformational Model of Social Agency (TMSA)) which presented the need for the personal and social transformation of the SCO co-ordinators, the SCOs and the Somali Diaspora Community

Influential immigrant-receiving country actors have long articulated the need for a comprehensive approach to immigration policy. However, even in the midst of immigration policy failure, immigrant receiving countries have tended to not implement comprehensive approaches. This thesis classifies comprehensive approaches into regional and unilateral approaches and asks: what factors explain immigrant receiving country marginalization of regional approaches to immigration policy with immigrant-sending countries? Three factors can explain immigrant-receiving country marginalization of regional approaches to immigration policy with immigrant-sending countries: political salience, interests and institutions. This thesis's explanatory model incorporates the political salience of immigration as the independent variable, interests and institutions as mediating variables, and the marginalization of regional approaches to immigration policy as the dependent variable. First, this thesis hypothesizes that during shifts from low to high political salience of immigration, immigrant-receiving countries exhibit a tendency to marginalize regional approaches to immigration policy. Second, the relative marginalization of regional approaches to immigration policy across liberal democratic immigrant-receiving countries can be explained by key constraints: (1) convergence in political, economic and legal interests held by influential immigrant-receiving and immigrant-sending country actors towards regional approaches to immigration policy; (2) insulation of immigrant-receiving country immigration agencies through internal constraints, including the immigrant-receiving country regime type; and (3) insulation of immigrant receiving country immigration agencies through external constraints, including bilateral and regional institutionalization. This thesis applies the Mexico-US and Morocco-Spain dyads to the explanatory model and explores their immigration policy experiences utilizing a process-tracing approach that considers political discourse and policy implementation stages of the public policy cycle. Ultimately, there is a relationship between the political salience of immigration and the marginalization of regional approaches to immigration policy. Interest and institution-based constraints help to explain why Spain did not marginalize regional approaches to immigration policy with Morocco to the same extent as the US with Mexico.

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This thesis investigates the construction of Finnish identity by Finnish policymakers when discussing the Right to Return Policy for Ingrian Finns. This policy, which existed from 1990 to 2010, granted Finnish residency to citizens of the Soviet Union, and subsequently Russia and Estonia, who descended from seventeenth century Finnish émigrés to the region around St Petersburg. The thesis critically analyses the discursive constructions of Finnish identity presented in the language of lawmakers on this policy, and argues that lawmakers established an ideology of Finnishness initially predicated on ideas of language, religion, ancestry, and historical relations to Finland’s neighbours Sweden and Russia. I further argue that lawmakers’ calls for an end of the policy in the late 1990s and 2000s used some of the same discursive constructions of Finnishness initially employed to justify Ingrian inclusion to now exclude Ingrians from their idea of Finnishness. To a large extent, the history of the Ingrian Return policy therefore presents a renegotiation of Ingrian, but not Finnish, identity by Finnish lawmakers. The thesis contributes to the study of identity construction on two levels. Firstly the policy presents the tension between constructions of Finnishness as an ethnic identity and as a community of Finnish citizens, and shows the relative resilience of ethnicity-based identity constructions in Finnish immigration policy at this time. Secondly, the Ingrian Finnish Return policy provides a case study of how essentialising discursive constructions of identity can be strategically used in political discussions. Analysis of this policy contributes to the broader study of identity theorisations as an example of establishing identity norms through public policy, using essentialising identity constructions that ignore alternative views of the nation as a diverse community, particularly in a period of increasing migration.

Irregular migrants, being defined as asylum seekers, refugees and clandestinos (people in the EU without a valid residency permit), live as a subaltern group at the fringes of European society. They are materially deprived and excluded from regular political culture. In part, this condition stems from the institutions of European integration, such as the Dublin Regulation. This dissertation attempts to understand irregular migrant subalternity by exploring its structural causes. Irregular migration and its management is used as a case study to contribute towards a deeper understanding of the social purpose of European integration. Methodologically, this thesis relies on Critical Grounded Theory. This novel approach is rooted in critical realism and thus rejects the tabula rasa-view of traditional Grounded Theory, maintaining that empirics and theory should continuously inform one another. The Gramscian concept of hegemony is employed to contextualise European integration within neofunctionalism as an ideological practice and neoliberalism as a hegemonic agenda. Vulgar neofunctionalism postulates that integration occurs as the result of spillover of one policy area into another and that European integration is pushed forward by technocratic elites. To illustrate the relationship between neofunctionalism and neoliberalism, to lay bare the consequences of neoliberal and neofunctionalist practices, and to further capture the social purpose of European integration, fieldwork was carried out in five locations (Brussels, Greece, Bulgaria, Italy and Germany) with different groups of interviewees (European Commission staff, national public officials, asylum seekers, clandestinos, fruit farm workers, asylum accommodation staff). It was found that neoliberal neofunctionalism has generated a common outlook on migratory movements which has resulted in the partial harmonisation of asylum legislation and the simultaneous fortification of the EU’s external border. This has had a significant impact on the lives of irregular migrants, who are exposed to reification, commodification, biopolitics, the state of exception, xenophobia and lacking recognition. The emergence of group consciousness is undermined, preventing them from overcoming subalternity. The social purpose of European integration is identified as the (increasingly authoritarian) neoliberal restructuration of the EU which relies on neofunctionalism as its vehicle and justification. This restructuration is self-contradictory as it aims at neoliberalism while producing nationalism, biopolitics and the EU’s deepening internal division. Within the context of the European Union’s democratic deficit and the weakness of social democracy, nationalism may represent an alternative to neoliberalism, speeding up the EU’s disintegration.