My thesis research centres on the question, how have refugee policy formation and ground level implementation impacted the conditions and experiences of displaced Burmese in Thailand from 1988 to 2008? I examine the effects of the production of subject categories through Thai national laws and practices, a bilateral agreement, and the United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees, in order to uncover how official policies are used to manage refugees. This study addresses questions regarding policy formation and implementation toward Burmese who have fled political oppression in Burma (Myanmar) and identifies issues related to the recognition of difference and the allocation of rights in the cultural contexts of migration and integration of minority populations. The formulation and implementation of refugee policies has global implications since policy solutions in general are developed from a perspective that ignores the emergence and significance of displacement.

My thesis research centres on the question, how have refugee policy formation and ground level implementation impacted the conditions and experiences of displaced Burmese in Thailand from 1988 to 2008? I examine the effects of the production of subject categories through Thai national laws and practices, a bilateral agreement, and the United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees, in order to uncover how official policies are used to manage refugees. This study addresses questions regarding policy formation and implementation toward Burmese who have fled political oppression in Burma (Myanmar) and identifies issues related to the recognition of difference and the allocation of rights in the cultural contexts of migration and integration of minority populations. The formulation and implementation of refugee policies has global implications since policy solutions in general are developed from a perspective that ignores the emergence and significance of displacement.

In the beginning of the 1990's Swedish immigration policy, which bad been considered liberal and generous, became increasingly restrictive. A number of domestic as well as international factors led to new restrictions that particularly affected Bosnians with Croatian passports who applied for asylum. They were the first refugee group subject to new policy regulations and practices called 'temporary protection' (TUT). They also became the object of experimentation with diverse ideas concerning the development of a new immigration policy that emphasized the notion of 'repatriation' as opposed to 'integration'. This study consists of five articles that analyse these complex social processes from different methodological angles, trying to connect micro issues with macro ones, global issues with national issues, and local phenomena with practices affecting the individual. The introductory article deals with the experience of leaving one's country though the narrative of a single woman. During her period of immigration, she had been exposed to different national interests, discriminatory legislation and a variety of refugee experiences. These experiences included persecution, flight and emigration that were related to conditions of immigration, refuge and exclusion. The second article shows how the refugees coped with the labyrinth of temporality caused by the new Swedish refugee and immigration policy. This policy had been developed against the backdrop of EU harmonisation and insisted on temporary protection and repatriation. The third article is a comparative analysis of immigration processes in two different munici­palities: Malmö and Karlskrona. This article shows that such different institutional contexts create different coping strategies among refugees. For example, Malmö as a large munici­pality with a long history of immigration is different from Karlskrona, which is a smaller town without such experiences with foreigners. Also, in Malmö there was no specific refugee camp whereas there was one in Karlskrona. The fourth article deals with the impact of the Swedish welfare state's austerity policy on the reception of local refugees. As a consequence of these changes, special relationships among refugees developed. These included both friendship and animosity as well as conflict and solidarity. Such relationships challenge the conventional wisdom that assumes that differences in ethnicity will only lead to conflicts among different groups. The fifth article examines the limits of this conventional wisdom. For example, while conflicts among different ethnic groups from the former Yugoslavia persist, solidarity among these groups has also developed as they respond to the difficulties of immigration and social exclusion. In order to analyse the complexity of a process that includes the global, local and individual levels, I developed a multifaceted theoretical approach. This thesis addresses four aspects of a refugee's status: essentialization, thera- peutization, 'problem' that refugees cause for international state system and exclusion. In this connection, my main conclusion is that the social position of being a refugee in particular, as well as processes of social inclusion in general, can only be understood if we move beyond essential and biological explanations and beyond culturalization and therapeutization. Instead, we must focus on social and structural explanations. / digitalisering@umu

This thesis analyzes the impact of Europeanization on domestic policy structures in states which are not European Union (EU) members within the framework of asylum and refugee policies. It focuses on the influence of Europeanization during Turkey&amp / #8217 / s pre-accession process to the EU after 1999. This thesis has three main goals. The first one is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics behind Europeanization of asylum and refugee policies. The second goal is to highlight the institutional, administrative and ideational environment in which these policies take place. Finally, it aims to analyze how the dynamics of European integration through legislative harmonization creates systemic transformation in domestic governance systems in the EU candidate countries in their pre-accession process.

Studies of why political parties in Sweden motivated their change of statements and policies during the refugee crisis in 2015 have been limited. I argue that it is relevant to question Swe- den’s traditional image as an open and generous country towards refugees. A change of policies took place within the traditional refugee friendly political parties in Sweden. Therefore, this thesis helps explain context for changes in the policies of the Green and Left parties during the refugee crisis 2015 in Sweden. It outlines the different policy outcomes between the Green and the Left parties and explains why two parties with initially similar positions concerning refugee issues became so markedly divided in a time of crisis. In this study, both quantitative and qual- itative methods involving content analysis and semi-structured interview techniques have been used in order to examine to what extent a change of reasoning led to different policy outcomes for the Left and Green parties. Interviews were used to gain deeper knowledge about each party’s approach towards refugees during Fall of 2015. Studies on Swedish refugee policies during the refugee crisis 2015 have either focused on 1) how refugees have been framed in news media and by politicians and 2) the socio-economic effects refugees have on Sweden because of badly managed integration policies. Less focus has been placed on how social economic reconstruction (proactive planning that allows groups from below to organize their resources) can become a powerful tool for political parties to provide solution-oriented refugee policies. Considering this unexplored area, this study analyses the Green and Left Parties’ refugee policies and how they developed during the refugee crisis by 2015. The research questions therefore relate to the change of policies of the Green and Left parties related to concepts such as solidarity and compassion for refugees and the need for greater restrictions on the number of refugees coming to Sweden through scarcity reduction and shifting budgets. The conclusion is that during the crisis, the concept of solidarity towards refugees was being tested and the debate mainly focused on quick solutions to the current crisis by restricting the number of asylum seekers through stricter laws. In contrast, policy discourse did not engage investments in solution-oriented policies with long run benefits, e.g. improving the efficiency of labor market policies to facilitate new arrivals’ labor market entry and social inclusion.

Previous literature on the Europeanization of candidate countries has lacked careful empirical investigations into how the process drives domestic policies to change in line with the EU acquis. Selecting on the least-likely case of Turkey and its refugee and asylum policy, I identify that previous work has assumed that Turkey’s policy shifts have been driven by rationalist cost- benefit calculations of its government. The purpose of this study has been to empirically investigate and trace the mechanisms of Europeanization in the selected case, in order to thereby contribute to knowledge on the process of Europeanization in candidate countries in general, and address to the previous research gap. Given this purpose, I have aimed to produce answers to the research question: how has the EU affected Turkey’s asylum and refugee policy after the declaration of candidacy status? I hypothesize that a rationalist model driven by the EU’s conditionality can indeed explain domestic policy changes in Turkey, but also that an alternative mechanism of socialization has been at play. Tracing the process of Europeanization through secondary sources, the results show that what started with behavioral-adaptation of domestic policy change in alignment with the EU’s laws, norms and demands between 1999 and 2010, between 2011 and 2018 the Turkish asylum and refugee policies started to step away from the push power of the external incentives. Nonetheless, significant domestic policy changes continued, suggesting evidence against the rationalist conditionality model of Europeanization in this period. However, I argue that the results are not strong enough to make the claim Turkey’s domestic policy change was driven by a mechanism of socialization, but rather suggest there has been initiation of a switch between the mechanisms.