Search Results (7)

When people move across borders to seek asylum because of violence, conflicts, persecution, or human rights violations, they experience a complex mix of psychological and traumatic downfalls. Often, refugees and asylum seekers’ trauma is compounded by the behaviours of individuals, communities, and the systemic climate of host countries. The United States is host to refugees and asylees from several countries. Evidence shows that several asylum seekers are held up in deplorable conditions in immigration detention centres where they are battling acute trauma. Therefore, consequent to this, coupled with the varying trauma that refugees face, this preliminary scoping review explores the scope and context of available peer-reviewed scholarship on trauma recovery pathways among refugees in the United States to identify gaps for further research. Following the PRISMA-compliant scoping review guidelines, we identified and curated data on the scope and context of peer-reviewed literature on trauma recovery approaches among refugees in the United States. This study identified the following as trauma recovery pathways among refugees: (1) macro-level structural intervention—preventing re-traumatization; (2) culturally sensitive therapeutic intervention; and (3) diagnosis and therapy. This study concludes that little research on the recovery pathways among refugees exists in the United States, hence the need for scholarship in this area. Full article

Four decades of civil war, violence, and destabilisation have forced millions of Afghans to flee their homes and to move to other countries worldwide. This increasing phenomenon may challenge physicians unfamiliar with the health status of this population, which may be markedly different from that of the host country. Moreover, several factors during their migration, such as transport in closed containers, accidental injuries, malnutrition, and accommodation in detention centres and refugee camps have a major influence on the health of refugees. By taking into account the variety of the specific diseases among migrant groups, the diversity of the origins of refugees and asylum seekers, and the increasing numbers of Afghan refugees, in this review we focus on the population of Afghans and describe their health status with the aim of optimising our medical approach and management. Our literature review shows that the most prevalent reported infections are tuberculosis and other respiratory tract infections and parasitic diseases, for example leishmaniasis, malaria, and intestinal parasitic infections. Anaemia, hyperlipidaemia, arterial hypertension, diabetes, smoking, overweight, malnutrition, low socioeconomic status, and poor access to healthcare facilities are additional risk factors for non-communicable diseases among Afghan refugees. With regards mental health issues, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are the most common diagnoses and culture shock and the feeling of being uprooted modulate their persistence. Further research is needed in order to provide us with extensive, high-quality data about the health status of Afghan refugees. The main objective of this review is to identify protective factors which could ensure key health concepts and good clinical practice. Full article

Australia’s brutal carceral-border regime is a colonial system of intertwining systems of oppression that combine the prison-industrial complex and the border-industrial complex. It is a violent and multidimensional regime that includes an expanding prison industry and onshore and offshore immigration detention centres; locations of cruelty, and violent sites for staging contemporary politics and coloniality. This article shares insights into the making of a radical intersectional dance theatre work titled Jurrungu Ngan-ga by Marrugeku, Australia’s leading Indigenous and intercultural dance theatre company. The production, created between 2019–2021, brings together collaborations through and across Indigenous Australian, Kurdish, Iranian, Palestinian, Filipino, Filipinx, and Anglo settler performance, activism and knowledge production. The artistic, political and intellectual dimensions of the show reinforce each other to interrogate Australia’s brutal carceral regime and the concept of the border itself. The article is presented in a polyphonic structure of expanded interviews with the cast and descriptions of the resulting live performance. It identifies radical ways that intersectional and trans-disciplinary performances can, as an ‘act of liberation’, be applied to make visible, embody, address, and help dismantle systems of oppression, control and subjugation. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic has thus far restricted the large movement of people; nonetheless, we cannot exclude the disruptive power of a virus with similar characteristics to COVID-19 affecting both high- and low-income countries, as a factor for future mass migrations. Indeed, the top 15 countries affected by COVID-19 host about 9 million refugees, and it is, therefore, important to investigate and strengthen the readiness of countries’ health policies to ensure they are well equipped to deal with potential large influxes of ‘epidemic-related refugees and migrants.’ Using the Bardach Policy Framework as a tool for analysis, this article investigates the readiness of countries for a potential public health event (mass migration generated by future pandemics), therefore, aiming at a health response forecasting exercise. The article reviews the policies put in place by countries who faced large influxes of migrants between 2011 and 2015 (the policy-prolific years between the Arab Spring migration and the introduction of stringent measures in Europe) and new evidence generated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (including the ‘ECDC Guidance on infection prevention and control of COVID-19 in migrant and refugee reception and detention centres in the EU/EEA and the UK’ and the ‘WHO Lancet priority for dealing with migration and COVID-19′) to formulate a policy option able to strengthen national system capacities for responding to influxes of epidemic-related migrants and the management of highly infectious diseases. Full article

The Australian government has spent over a billion dollars a year on managing offshore detention (Budget 2018–2019). Central to this offshore management was the transference and mandatory detention of asylum seekers in facilities that sit outside Australia’s national sovereignty, in particular on Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) and Nauru. As a state-sanctioned spatial aberration meant to deter asylum seekers arriving by boat, offshore detention has resulted in a raft of legal and policy actions that are reshaping the modern state-centric understanding of the national space. It has raised questions of sovereignty, of moral, ethical and legal obligations, of national security and humanitarian responsibilities, and of nationalism and belonging. Using a sample of Twitter users on Manus during the closure of the Manus Island detention centre in October–November 2017, this paper examines how asylum seekers and refugees have negotiated and defined the offshore detention space and how through the use of social media they have created a profound disruption to the state discourse on offshore detention. The research is based on the premise that asylum seekers’ use social media in a number of disruptive ways, including normalising the presence of asylum seekers in the larger global phenomena of migration, humanising asylum seekers in the face of global discourses of dehumanisation, ensuring visibility by confirming the conditions of detention, highlighting Australia’s human rights violations and obligations, and challenging the government discourse on asylum seekers and offshore detention. Social media is both a tool and a vehicle by which asylum seekers on Manus Island could effect that disruption. Full article

This paper looks at the challenges to the sustainable development of migrant and refugee children in Libyan refugee camps and migrant detention centres. Libya, next to Syria, is still the most destabilised Arab country with a myriad of conflicting parties, warlords, militias, terrorist organisations as well as smugglers and traffickers that continuously compete in a complex network of multidimensional power struggles. Our single case study based on ethnographic fieldwork adopts the human security approach, which provides security analysis with an inherently “sustainable” dimension. In the paper we provide an overview of the empirical study carried out in seven Libyan refugee camps (Tripoli, Tajoura, Sirte, Misrata, Benghazi, Derna and Tobruk) between 2013 and 2019. Our findings show that for refugee children even everyday activities pose a danger to health and life, and the many threats to their security encompass a broad spectrum from health to safety, from education to falling prey to bundlers from terrorist organisations and paramilitary militias. These issues, undoubtedly pertinent on the individual level of analysis, are further exacerbated by the underlying, conflict-induced factors and preclude a safe and secure environment. Full article

This paper begins with an account of Lucía Vega Jimenez, a Mexican woman who lived and worked in Metro Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories (Canada) and who died while held in detention in British Columbia’s Immigration Holding Centre. This article argues that Lucía’s story exposes a number of critical aspects regarding the geographies and politics of migration in Canada today. First, Lucia’s story points to the ways in which Canada’s determination process invisibilises certain forms of violence and, as such, serves as a highly restrictive and exclusionary mechanism. Second, it shows how this exclusionary mechanism extends like ‘capillaries’ throughout urban space. In this context city services (like transit) increasingly become less spaces of refuge, and more privatized border checkpoints. Third, following Lucia’s story reveals how city checkpoints funnel people with precarious status into remote detention, akin to Foucault’s ‘carceral archipelago.’ While expanding on carceral literature, this paper departs from existing scholarship that tends to think about remoteness horizontally. The paper argues that it is below the surface where carceral regimes become particularly hostile and—as such—the paper calls for deepened engagement with questions of verticality. Finally, the article illustrates how subterranean carceral dimensions are being politicized, agonistically, through sanctuary practices. Full article