Post‐2015 refugees in Germany: “Culture of welcome”, solidarity or exclusion?
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| Author | Zeynep Yanaşmayan |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.13149 |
International Migration. 2023;61:3–11.
|
3
wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/imig
Received: 11 Apri l 2023
|
Accepted: 17 April 20 23
DOI: 10 .1111/imig .13149
EDITORIAL
Post- 2015 refugees in Germany: “Culture of
welcome”, solidarity or exclusion?
INTRODUCTION
This special issue project was conc eived at a time when Ge rmany has prominently come to the fo re during
the “summer of m igration” in 2015 assumin g a leading role in Eu ropean asylum rece ption system. The G erman
Federal Office for Migra tion and Refugees (BAMF) r egistered mo re than one mi llion asylum applicati ons in
2015 and 2016 (BAMF, 2019:5 ) when Dubl in regula tions were temporar ily lift ed to enabl e the arri val of most ly
Syrian forced migrants fleeing the civil war and the oppression of the Assad regime. In a cruel twist of fate, at
the tim e of the writing of this introd uction, Ger many undergoes a similar process of reception of forced mi-
grants fr om Ukraine seeki ng shelter/protection away from the Russian aggression. While the legal fram ework
put in pla ce differs wide ly, lessons that ca n be drawn from the “summer of mig ration” remain cru cial to tackle
the current si tuation.
This requires obtaining a comprehensive understanding of th e arrivals in 2015 and thereafter. This special
issue aims to contribute to the growing body of sch olarship by reading the situati on of p ost- 2015 ref ugees
through the l ens of exclusion that is conceived as inter locking an d co- existing with p rocesses of inclusion.
The approach taken he re relies chiefly on the broad er framewo rk develop ed within the context of a large
project fun ded by the Max Planck Societyi (see Foblet s et al., 2018; Foble ts & Yanaşmayan, 2022; Hrusc hka &
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 segmenta-
tion”, the p roposition of this speci al issue is to ex pand the foc us on how dif ferent act s of exclusion , not limited
to the topogr aphical bordering practices and gover nance tools, by state as well as non- state actors c an hinder
access to the ter ritory, to r ights claims as well as to ne eded resource s in dif ferent areas and ultimat ely pre-
vent full participation . Significantly, this lens of exclusion intr insically encom passes an at tention to mig rants'
practices of resist ance and s olidarity, which further posits exclu sion as amb iguous, tempor ally bounded and
sphere- dependent.
In order to document the variet y 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 polit-
ical science, all working with ori ginal empirical data, collecte d in interviews, observations , surveys, laws and policy
documents. T his special issue sheds light on this his torical critical junc ture in European migration his tory that had
become quintess entially associated with a “cri sis” rhetoric (Crawley & Skle paris, 2018; Triandafyllid ou, 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, t he 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) s ocietal responses.
© 2023 Internati onal Organizati on for Migration.
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