Crux of Refugee Resettlement

While the world’s refugee population reaches record high numbers, countries offering third-country resettlement are increasingly shifting toward policies of exclusion and austerity. This edited volume envisions a more humane future for refugee resettlement. Combining anthropology with a variety of professional perspectives (education, health care, theology, administration, politics, and social work) ethnography is used to demonstrate the efficacy of programs and interventions that create and nurture social capital in culturally specific and accessible ways. The contributors present case studies of resettlement in the United States, England, Australia, and Canada and contend that social networks have an essential role—are the crux—in the reconfigurations of refugee well-being, belonging, and place-making vis-à-vis the bureaucratic limitations of state and institutional factors. This book includes short contributions from refugees, representatives of resettlement organizations, and government officials, including Jhuma N. Acharya, Bimala Bastola, Khada Bhandari, Kiri Hata, Govin Magar, Madhu Neupane, Natacha Nikokeza, Angela K. Plummer, Lance Rasbridge, Chris Sunderlin, David Thatcher, and John Tluang.

The Crux of Refugee Resettlement is an intriguing and uplifting exploration of the way that resettled refugees adapt to their new homes, focusing on the limitations of formal assistance programs and the central role played by social networks, solidarity and community-based action in the integration process. This is essential reading for policymakers, practitioners and researchers engaged in the issue of refugee resettlement., The Crux of Refugee Resettlement has strongly advanced the field of migration and refugee studies with this deeply insightful and comprehensive exploration of the complexities in the lives of displaced peoples and their making (remaking) of new homes. This human-centered book understands refugee strengths and possibilities while also discussing internal weaknesses and conflicts of the community, revealing a treasure of qualitative and partnership methodologies that have allowed the authors to gain trust of and access to the refugee and immigrant communities. It demonstrates the social capital, strengths, and strategies that refugees utilize to overcome poorly constructed and administered government policies, and presents new methods of understanding best practices.  Indeed, it becomes evident that refugees have much to teach all of us.

Andrew Nelson is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of North Texas.Alexander Rödlach is associate professor of medical anthropology and psychiatry at Creighton University.Roos Willems is cultural anthropologist at the University of Leuven.