L’état actuel des travaux ne rend pas compte de l’ampleur des questions philosophiques et des enjeux moraux suscités par l’apparition sur la scène internationale des réfugiés climatiques. Il est pourtant urgent de leur accorder une protection à travers des accords internationaux. Les philosophes qui se sont penchés sur le sujet ont été induits en erreur tant par la multiplicité des termes employés que leur absence de définitions. Ce travail critique la tendance actuelle des militants écologistes à vouloir englober des populations aux problèmes divers sous le terme de réfugié. Banaliser l’emploi du terme de réfugié n’est pas seulement fallacieux mais également dangereux. A terme, les militants se tourneront vers la Convention de Genève pour revendiquer que les populations déplacées soient considérées comme des réfugiés. Or la Convention de Genève n’est pas un outil adéquat pour remédier au sort de ces populations. De plus, on ne peut élargir le statut de réfugié pour inclure ces populations sans risquer de perdre sa crédibilité et son efficience. Suivre la pente qu’emprunte les militants nous mènerait à accorder le même traitement aux réfugiés climatiques et aux réfugiés politiques, ce qui est une erreur. Notre hypothèse est que les habitants des petits pays insulaires à l’inverse des autres populations ont besoin d’un élargissement de la Convention de Genève. Nous arguerons que nous avons des devoirs et des responsabilités envers eux que nous n’avons pas envers les réfugiés politiques. Pour défendre ce point de vue, il faut définir clairement ce qu’est un réfugié climatique et justifier cette appellation. Nous devrons donc confronter la notion de réfugié climatique à d’autres notions concurrentes. Une fois les termes définis, nous envisagerons les enjeux éthiques à travers le prisme des questions de justice globale. Nous verrons que pour déterminer qui devrait remédier au sort des réfugiés climatique, il ne suffit pas de se référer à la responsabilité causale. Cela nous mènera à arguer que bien que séduisant, le principe pollueur-payeur n’est pas un outil adéquat pour guider la réflexion. Nous serons également amenés à nous interroger sur la pertinence d’une institution environnementale globale. / Current works on the forced migration area does not reveal the magnitude of the philosophical and moral issues raised by the appearance of climate refugees on the international scene . Yet it is urgent to provide protection to them through international agreements. Philosophers who have studied the subject have been misled by both the multiplicity of terms and the lack of definitions. This work criticizes the current trend set by environmental activists who want to include people with various issues under the term of refugee. Trivializing the term of refugee is not only misleading but also dangerous. Eventually, the activists will turn to the Geneva Convention to demand that displaced populations be treated as refugees. But the Geneva Convention is not an appropriate tool to address the plight of these people. Moreover, we can not extend the status of refugees to include those people without losing the credibility and efficiency. Following the path taken by activists would lead us to give equal treatment to climate refugees and political refugees, which is a mistake. Our hypothesis is that the inhabitants of small island countries, in contrast to other populations require a broadening of the Geneva Convention. We shall argue that we have duties and responsibilities to them that we do not have to political refugees. To defend this view, we must clearly define what a climate refugee is and justify this term. We must therefore confront the notion of climate refugee to other competing concepts. Once the terms are defined, we will consider the ethical issues through the prism of global justice issues. We will see that it is not enough to refer to causal responsibility to determine the members who should address the plight of climate refugees. This will lead us to argue that although attractive, the polluter pays principle is not an appropriate tool to guide our reflection. We will also be led to question the relevance of a global environmental institution.

Thesis (M. A. (Social Work)) -- University of Limpopo, 2021 / Southern Africa encounters an exceptional international human mobility. Several studies view South Africa as a host country for a large number of immigrants, particularly migrant youth who come from other African countries. Upon their arrival in South Africa, studies show that migrant youth encounter a vast number of challenges such as being excluded from welfare services of South Africa. It is from this background that this study sought to explore survival strategies that migrant youth in Musina Town employ for their sustainability. This study presents qualitative findings on the survival strategies employed by migrant youth in Musina Town, Limpopo Province of South Africa. Ten migrant youth in Musina Town who are accommodated in shelters managed by churches were used as a case study and were purposively and conveniently selected to participate in the study. Data was collected through face to face semi-structured interviews and analysed thematically through the assistance of the Nvivo software. The resilience, neoclassical and network theories were used to guide the study. However, the resilience theory served as the over-arching theory of the study as it is more relevant and appropriate in explaining how migrant youth bounced back to normality after the hardships they experienced in South Africa. Findings reveal that bad economic conditions from countries of origin pushed young people to South Africa for better livelihoods. However, due to lack of funds, some crossed borders fraudulently for their survival. Upon their arrival in South Africa, findings further revealed that some migrant youth engage in criminal acts to make a living. It was also found that some migrant youth are involved in sex work to make a living. Social networking with their counterparts, street vending, cheap and exploitative labour were also found to be strategies employed by migrant youth for their sustainable livelihoods. It is thus concluded that migrant youth in South Africa are exposed to bad conditions upon their arrival in the country for their sustainable livelihoods. Findings also reveal various coping strategies that migrant youth employ to mitigate their exclusion from South African welfare services. Recommendations which include integrated intervention and future research are provided in this study

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For a long time, the situation of refugees and asylum seekers has been a source of concern for EU Member states. While different European countries' policies and practices have received much scrutiny, the discourses they produce are less visible in academia. This study thus explores the policy decisions and laws behind the EU’s responses to the refugee crises of 2015 and 2022 by comparing Syrian refugees to Ukrainian refugees in order to understand the distinction in treatment. Through a postcolonial perspective, this study employs a Mediated Discourse Analysis that presents a mainly conventional discourse of refugees and asylum seekers in the context of policies and laws. The analysis found a strong influence of ‘Eurocentrism’ through exclusionary policies, implying a continued concept of 'othering' and the 'myth of differences' as the underlying reason for different asylum policies and laws affecting the right to seek asylum.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Robert K. Schaeffer / The United States has resettled unaccompanied minors before. In the 1960s and 1970s, minors from Indochina were resettled in the United States. In the 1970s, the U.S accepted 14,000 unaccompanied minors from Cuba through Operation Peter Pan. Many of these Cuban minors, aged five to eighteen, were sent to the United States by parents fearing their children would be indoctrinated in communist schools. In the case of these minors, they arrived in the United States with the consent of their still-living family members. In contrast, about 3,500 Sudanese Lost Boys were resettled in the United States in 2000, and more recently in 2010, 53 “lost children” from Haiti were brought to the United States following a devastating earthquake. This study investigated the integration and assimilation patterns of the Sudanese Lost Boys in the Kansas City area with the purpose of understanding the sociological impact on these Boys from their own perspective. As opposed to previous studies done on these Boys in Kansas and other areas in the United States, the present study used interview-based research and analyzed data using both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. The study concluded that the Lost Boys were both “Lost” and “Found” in complex ways. The study found that unaccompanied refugees labeled as minors at the time of resettlement integrated more “successfully” than those resettled as adults. Minor Boys received certain advantages over Boys who were labeled legal adults. Over time, those resettled as minors accumulated more social capital relevant in American society, while those resettled as legal adults fell behind. The findings highlighted problems associated with age-based treatment of refugees, especially in the case of the Boys who were arbitrarily classified as adults. Assigned ages significantly impacted their assimilation process into American society. Unlike those Boys resettled as minors, legal adults did not have access to structure and immersion opportunities afforded by foster families, formal education, and social activities. This study concluded that age-based disadvantage was evident in the case of the Lost Boys.

Bakgrund: 2014 anlände drygt 80.000 flyktingar till Sverige. Dessa individer kan ha varit med om traumatiska händelser vilket i sin tur kan ha bidragit till sämre psykisk hälsa i form av depression, posttraumatisk stressyndrom och psykos. Sjuksköterskor som möter flyktingar med psykisk ohälsa upplever olika svårigheter vid omvårdnad av flyktingar. För att sjuksköterskorna ska kunna optimera vården behövs större förståelse för deras upplevelser av denna patientgrupp med psykisk ohälsa. Syfte: Syftet med studien är att beskriva sjuksköterskors upplevelser att vårda flyktingar med psykisk ohälsa. Metod: En studie med empirisk ansats i form av kvalitativa intervjuer med fem sjuksköterskor inom en psykiatrisk verksamhet. All data analyserades med hjälp av en innehållsanalys. Resultat: Det var flertalet olika upplevelser som synliggjordes i resultatet, vilka utmynnade i fem teman: "upplevelser att tillgodose flyktingars behov", "upplevelser av kompetensutveckling", "upplevelser av kulturkrock", "upplevelser av maktlöshet" samt "upplevelser av medlidande för flyktingen". Slutsats: Två av de fem dimensionerna av sjuksköterskors upplevelser är nya i förhållande till tidigare studiers fynd. Dessa upplevelser är maktlöshet och medlidande som är viktiga att beaktas i sjuksköterskors arbete inom psykiatrisk vård. Medlidandet hos sjuksköterskorna i studien bidrog till en ökad påfrestande belastning, både under och utanför arbetstid. Professionell handledning och utbildning är väsentliga för att underlätta sjuksköterskans vård av flyktingar med psykisk ohälsa. Fortsatt forskning: För att minimera upplevelse av exempelvis maktlöshet måste vidare forskning på nationell och internationell nivå på detta område utvecklas. Detta genom att undersöka på djupet vilka situationer som orsakar upplevelse av maktslöshet och medlidande hos sjuksköterskor inom psykiatrisk vård. / Background: In 2014 about 80,000 refugees arrived to Sweden. Most of these individuals have experienced traumatic events, which contributed to mental illness, example of these diagnosis are depression, PTSD and psychosis. Registrered nurses who take care of this group of patients facing some difficulties in their caring. To optimize the caring there is a essential need of comprehensive for the nurse´s experiences of refugees with mental illness. Aim: The aim of the study is to describe the experiences of registred nurses to care of refugees with mental illness. Method: A study with a empirical approach, qualitative interviews with five registrered nurses in a psychiatric clinic. All data were analysed through a content analysis. Results: The results demonstrated five different experiences of the nurses: "experiences of caring of the refugees, "experiences of the need of skills development", "experiences of culture clash", "experiences of powerless" and "experiences of compassion". Conclusion: Two of five dimensions of experiences are new compare to earlier studies´ approaches: experience of powerlessness and experiences of compassion among the nurses in psychiatric care. Compassion of the nurses contributed to a tension in their own mental health. A professional supervision by the employer is necessary to facilitate the nurses´ care of the refugees. Further research: To minimize the experiences, for example powerlessness, the research should exspand on national and international basis.

This thesis is an ethnography of Palestinian political factions in Lebanon through an immersion in the daily life of homes. It explores the nature of factions and faction membership from the vantage point of those who form their very basis. It asks how did Palestinian political factions, which are clearly made of people, come to be seen as autonomous bodies that are studied as a whole and spoken of in the singular (‘Fatah did this’ and ‘Hamas declared that’). Through a detailed account of the everyday practices of Palestinian refugees I problematise the underlying conceptualization of factions in the academic literature as bounded structures defined by their respective ideologies. I explore how factions appear in the daily life of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon; how Palestinians join factions; how their relationship evolves over time; how they demand, and at times obtain, aid; how and whether they participate in events organized by factions; and how factionalism affects their understandings of what factions are. This ethnographic approach reveals that what binds Palestinian refugees to factions is not the ideology or regional or international alliances of the factions. For example, young Palestinians do not join a faction based on whether it is Islamic, Marxist, or nationalist; rather they do so based on where they have friends or family, and sometimes depending on which faction has the closest youth centre to their home. In fact, it is those personal relationships, including those developed with other faction members that keep Palestinians affiliated to factions. Factions appear as a loose network of people held together by different degrees of trust and cohesion. Yet my work does not dismiss the fact that factions also appear as structures, as coherent entities. On the contrary, in the second part of this thesis, I trace another set of practices, that of aid distribution, criticism, physical representation, and factionalism, to show how factions metamorphose from loose networks based on interpersonal relations into impersonal structures defined by ideology. An examination of the everyday practices and representations of Palestinian political factions reveals how those structures come into being, how that operation creates and maintains a certain configuration of power in Palestinian society, and how factions remain the center of political life in the face of widespread condemnation.

This thesis investigates asylum seekers/refugees’ orientations to belonging and identity. It is based on in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted among asylum seekers/refugees residing in Scotland between 2006 and 2008 and on a media monitoring of a number of UK newspapers. The interviews were analysed for interviewees’ orientations to feelings of belonging and identity with the UK, Scotland and homelands. They were also analysed for interviewees’ perceptions (beliefs and understandings) of newspapers’ reporting of asylum and importance to their sense of national belonging and national identity forming. The monitoring provided the context of newspapers’ reporting of asylum at the time of interviews. It enabled a small-scale examination of media content with reference to interviewees’ perceptions. The thesis explores two assumptions. Firstly, asylum seekers/refugees’ national belonging and national identity formations are complex and contingent upon their everyday ‘lived’ experiences. Secondly, asylum seekers/refugees’ belonging and identity formations, as social processes of citizenship, cannot be understood in isolation from the high visibility of the asylum issue in UK media. As an empirical study, therefore, its findings are deployed to critique policymaking, theoretical and media accounts of non-British citizens’ forms of belonging to, and identification with the British ‘nation’. It is suggested that, in addition to policymaking, there are other social circumstances that would facilitate ethnic minority migrants’ national belonging and national identity formations. These factors do not only account for the prioritising of Scottishness over Britishness, but also migrants’ ‘hyphenated’ identities. This thesis will therefore provide evidence suggesting that non-citizens (ethnic minorities), have their own meanings and agency of orientating to a feeling of national belonging and national identity that is nuanced and contingent on their experiences. The thesis does not aim to establish media causality. However, it highlights the fact that newspaper coverage can evoke responses from marginalised groups and provide the context from which identities are narrated and mobilised. The thesis will improve our understanding of the practices, meanings and contestations of belonging and identity that is grounded in the ‘lived’ experiences of noncitizens. This sociological dimension to ethnic minorities’ citizenship forming is not only poorly understood, but has been dominated by theoretical and policymaking accounts in the contemporary state.

This thesis engages and scrutinizes critiques of rights developed in Critical Legal Studies scholarship and critical international law theory, specifically as formulated in the works of prominent and influential legal theorists Duncan Kennedy and Martti Koskenniemi, and draws on them to grapple with the changes that Swedish refugee and asylum policy went through during the fall/winter of 2015 and 2016. During this period, a series of drastic and far-reaching restrictions were enacted. Despite this, the Swedish government could still, albeit under immense criticism, claim a status for their policies as respecting human rights and adhering to the principles of international law. Against this background, the purpose of this study is to examine anew, using works of Kennedy and Koskenniemi, the relationship between the concept of human rights on the one hand and politics on the other, and how this relationship can be observed to have been (re)negotiated during the policy shift in Sweden. The thesis also raises the question of whether any general or uniform assessment of rights discourse is available in the works of the chosen theorists, and if so, of what this consists. The results show that the indeterminacy and contingency of rights frameworks, which is pointed to by both theorists, provides a suitable perspective from which to view the flexibility of the discourse, but this perspective is also seen as partially inadequate and in need of being supplemented with an account of what, or who, effects actual policy outcomes and thus determines the social meaning and contents of human rights. The theoretical tools developed by Koskenniemi help explain how the structural biases of the deciding institutions, the Swedish government and the EU, contribute to the re-definition of the content of refugee rights. Further, it is argued that both theorists have some difficulty in expounding in any clear and unambiguous way just what consequences their critiques might have for how rights discourses can and should be approached. An engagement with asylum and refugee rights from a critical legal theory perspective was thus shown as offering both problems and possibilities.