Georgia, the Post-Soviet, transition country with struggling economy and territorial disputes has been dealing with forced migration since 1990s. In 2008, the country experienced another internal displacement wave and about 30,000 people were forced to flee from their homes. The state constructed compact IDP settlements and provided housing to affected households. After more than a decade, there is a significant gap in economic livelihoods of the IDP households in those settlements. The location and the size of the IDP settlements has had impact on the economics of IDP population and acted as main drivers of inequalities in integration across the settlements of forcibly displaced persons. The thesis will explore how the settlement facilitates or hampers employment and income-generation process for IDPs.  The conceptual framework utilized will be the combination of asset-based approach and cumulative disadvantage theory, push and pull factors theory of migration and the three key framework dimensions of camp design. The methodology used will include primary data collection through semi-structured interviews, secondary data collection through scholarly articles and reports, and the analysis and discussion of both.

This study examines the experiences of multiracial and multiethnic young adults in Finland, aged between 24-28, as they negotiate their daily lived experiences and construct their identities in the framework of ethnicity, race, belonging, and discrimination. The study utilises a qualitative research approach with a thematic analysis of four semi-structured interviews. In addition, drawing on Richard Jenkins' (2014) theory of social identity, the study discusses the relationship between these individuals and Finnish society. The findings highlight the impact of white normativity on the participants' self-identification and externally assigned identification, as well as fluidity in identity construction and challenges in belonging to Finnish society. Finally, the study highlights that the interviewees have a perception of what it means to be Finnish based on cultural and social norms.

This essay is an effort to highlight what integration is and how it is achieved. The aim of this study is to create a deeper understanding of integration and its process in Kristianstad. The focus is on a local level and Kristianstad as a municipality has been investigated. Two different categories of people have been interviewed for this study to be able to highlight integration. The first category includes personal that is working with integration in Kristianstad through a municipal perspective. The other category includes people that has immigrated to Kristianstad.  The theories that this essay used about integration is by Margareta Popoola and Jose Alberto Diaz. The result of my study shows that integration is seen as a process for both the minority group and the majority group to adapt on several levels to each other. Even though the groups are intended to adapt to each other the result show that its mostly the minority as a group that needs to adapt to the majority when integration is discussed. The conclusion of this study is partly that integration is a complicated term and can be understood differently depending on where and when its used. / Denna uppsats är ett försök att belysa vad integration är och hur det uppnås. Syftet med denna studie är att skapa en djupare förståelse för integration och dess process i Kristianstad. Fokuset ligger på lokal nivå och Kristianstad som kommun har utretts. Två olika kategorier av personer har intervjuats till denna studie för att diskutera kring integration. I den första kategorin ingår personal som arbetar med integration i Kristianstad utifrån ett kommunalt perspektiv. Den andra kategorin inkluderar personer som har invandrat till Kristianstad. Teorierna som denna uppsats använt om integration är av Margareta Popoola och Jose Alberto Diaz. Resultatet av min studie visar att integration ses som en process för både minoritetsgruppen och majoritetsgruppen att på flera plan anpassa sig till varandra. Även om grupperna är tänkta att anpassa sig till varandra visar resultatet att det mest är minoriteten som grupp som förväntas anpassa sig till majoriteten när integration diskuteras. Slutsatsen av denna studie är delvis att integration är ett komplicerat begrepp och kan förstås olika beroende på var och när det används.

Finland is recognized as a country with high human rights standards including the rights of the indigenous people that are protected by various declarations, conventions, and international human rights laws. Finland first enacted a Sámi Parliament Act in 1995 and has most recently in 2019 received criticism from the UN Human Rights Committee for not guaranteeing the rights for the legally recognized indigenous Sámi people living within Finland’s borders. Government proposal to reform the Act sparked the discussion of Sámi rights in Finland in the fall of 2022. Through a critical postcolonial perspective together with examining purposeful sampling material and the reform opposing discourse in the Finnish parliament, this thesis aims to get a view for the reason of the dismissal of the reform. It suggests that Finland’s position as a human rights model country in indigenous people’s rights is questionable in the matter of the Sámi rights.

In the pre-globalized era, when many nations were comparatively ethnically homogenous, sentiments about national identity and national membership were less contentious. Today, an increasingly open and inter-connected world is changing the demographic composition of countries across the globe. This growing diversity has unavoidably fueled debates about who really counts as belonging to the national community, and what qualifications need to, or should, be met to become a member of it. Does your cultural or ethnic heritage need to come from the historic ethnic majority, or is ethnicity irrelevant? Is it about adhering to a certain value base? If it is about values, what are they? This essay set out to answer these questions in the context of local expressions of nationalism in Sweden. Correlations of these expressions with ethnic nationalism were virtually non-existent. Multicultural nationalism enjoyed a bit more support, however not to any substantial degree. The ideal type of nationalism with the by far strongest presence in the data was civic nationalism, with clear references in the material to a national identity based on ethnic blindness, equality, and the rights and obligations that come with citizenship.

This thesis seeks to explore how humanitarian communication produces subjectivities for individuals. More specifically, it investigates how the innocent modern/colonial humanitarian subject is produced through appeals to emotions. To explore this phenomenon, this thesis develops a decolonial research approach grounded in epistemic disobedience. As such, it first disrupts the binary between rationality and emotions by focusing on the roles of compassion, anger and guilt in the making of the innocent humanitarian subject. Second, it presents autoethnography and storytelling as entry doors into disobeying the binary between subject and object of research. The analysis of the autoethnography is presented in different modes of analysis, between creative and more traditional social science writings. The analysis shows that guilt and knowledge permit to partially defeat the stance of innocence produced by humanitarian communication. Additionally, by recentring racism and European colonialism/imperialism as central to the study of humanitarianism, this thesis demonstrates the importance of adopting decolonial research strategies to defeat persisting structures of inequality.

The intersection of forced migration and disability is often overlooked, both in research, public discourse and political action. Building on the emerging literature looking at the situation in host countries and against the backdrop of the increasing focus on employment in both asylum and disability contexts, the thesis explores the access to the labour market for persons with disabilities and forced migration experience in Sweden and Germany. In order to answer the question of how pathways to the labour market for persons with disabilities and forced migration experience look like, the thesis combines a policy document analysis with four semi-structured interviews with organisations working at the intersection in both countries. The selected material and interviews are analysed with a reflexive thematic analysis approach following Braun & Clarke (2006) under an intersectional lens. The policy analysis shows, in addition to the lack of engagement with the intersection, that the respective asylum laws influence the access to the labour market through work permits and through their interplay with the provision of disability services. From the interviews, it appears that in both countries, persons with disabilities and forced migration experience get access to the labour market either through registration with the Employment Agency and their specific programmes for persons with disabilities, through sheltered workplaces in Sweden or sheltered workshops in Germany or personal contacts with diaspora communities or organisations. These different pathways are in both countries furthermore highly dependent on structural and personal prerequisites. Despite experiences of discrimination and ableism, the interviews highlight not only the complexity that comes with the intersection, but also that persons with disabilities and forced migration experience, often with the help of organisations, nevertheless navigate the pathways and find employment.

This thesis aims at exploring the role of organizations in asylum seekers' access to volunteering in Wallonia, Belgium. In Belgium, volunteering has been allowed for asylum seekers since 2014. Studies made after 2014 in Wallonia have shown that volunteering can benefit asylum seekers. However, research on volunteering in other contexts has found that, while volunteering is often depicted as an inclusive practice, valuable for volunteers and society, inequalities restrict access to volunteering. Research on volunteering tended to focus on the individual characteristics and resources that make certain groups less likely to volunteer, but at the meso level, organizations also have a role in determining who can access volunteering. Based on semi-structured interviews with members of organizations, the analysis examines the management of volunteering for asylum seekers in Wallonia to understand how the organizations' practices facilitate or restrict access to volunteering. Findings show that a network of sending and receiving organizations, reception centers and volunteering organizations, shapes access to volunteering for asylum seekers. This network aims at creating links between asylum seekers and other parts of the population through volunteering. Throughout the promotion of volunteering and the selection of volunteers and volunteering opportunities, organizations adopt strategies to enhance asylum seekers' participation in volunteering and to lift obstacles restricting access to volunteering. However, some organizational practices, including this selection, lead to the exclusion of asylum seekers from volunteering.

This thesis aims to understand and explore how the experience of adult Third Culture Kids (TCKs) – individuals who live abroad outside of their parents' passport country in their developmental years – impacted the development of their cultural identity. Child migrants on a global level are increasing in the modern context, and not enough literature has focused on exploring the impact a highly mobile and transient upbringing has on children. Therefore, this study presents a social science insight into how the impact of growing as a TCK impacts one's cultural identity construction, sense of belonging, and relation to place. Six interviews were conducted with adult TCKs and analysed using a thematic analysis framework. Results showed that the cultural identity of the adult TCKs was more complex to explore and understand primarily due to their unique base where they had the opportunity to get a wide range of exposure to opinions, perspectives, people, and cultures. Additionally, third culture communities are the environment that mould the TCKs' relation to culture and concepts of belonging and home. Most interviewees showed signs of early maturity regarding their value system, and perspective on life, both of which comprise their cultural identity. This is argued to be principally due to their exposure at a young age to an intricate web of actors, social cues, and different contextual environments. Lastly, given the sample groups' transient upbringing, they perceive that their relation to physical places is weak, resulting in continual revising of their identity and a strong connection to relational bonds. Potentially, TCKs have a paradigm that is distinctive as their conceptualisation of home, belonging, culture, and identity are developed in transient, diverse, and dynamic environments. The study provides valuable understanding on the TCK experience and its impact on cultural identity construction and relation to place. It contributes empirically and theoretically to the field of migration studies, child migrants and to underlining implications of being young and internationally mobile.

Throughout 2015, the European Union’s response to the large number of migrants crossing the Aegean Sea became increasingly securitised. It translated to the policing of non-governmental search and rescue organisations (SAR NGOs) active in the Aegean Sea. This thesis investigates the impact of policing on the ability of SAR NGOs to deliver humanitarian assistance in the Aegean Sea between 2015-2022. It employs social constructivist deviance theory to investigate the limiting effects of policing and its potential to generate resilience and resistance. Semi-structured interviews with five staff members and volunteers who worked with SAR NGOs in the Aegean Sea between 2015-2022 explore the research question. The findings were triangulated with existing scholarly literature to address the limited sample size. The study finds that policing limits SAR NGOs’ activities and fosters resilience and resistance. Resilience and resistance may have prolonged SAR NGOs’ ability to operate. Yet, over time, the increasing severity of policing, combined with intra- and inter-organisational fragmentation undermining resilience and resistance, forced SAR NGOs to end their humanitarian assistance in the Aegean Sea. Currently, no SAR NGOs are active in the Aegean Sea, resulting in a lack of search and rescue and human rights monitoring. Consequently, the risk of deaths and human rights abuses in the Aegean Sea has increased.