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The book focuses on the largest refugee crisis of our time: the Syrian refugee crisis. It exploits a wealth of survey and registry data on Syrian refugees living in Jordan and Lebanon to assess their poverty and vulnerability status, understand the predictors of these statuses, evaluate the performance of existing policies toward refugees, and determine the potential for alternative policies. Findings point to a complex situation. In the absence of humanitarian assistance, poverty is extremely high among refugees. Current policies including cash transfers and food vouchers are effective in reducing poverty but they remain short of providing economic inclusion and self-reliance of refugees. A shift toward economic inclusion and self-reliance would require a different humanitarian and development paradigm, one that focuses on growth policies for areas affected by refugees where the target population is constituted by refugees and hosting populations alike. This joint study by the World Bank Group and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees helps bridge the historical divide between humanitarian and development work by providing practical solutions for assisting refugees in the short, medium and long-term and to prevent the irreversible loss of social and human capital typically associated with prolonged refugee crises.

Turkey now hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees in the world, more than 3.6 million of the 12.7 million displaced by the Syrian Civil War. Many of them are subject to an unpredictable temporary protection, forcing them to live under vulnerable and insecure conditions. The Precarious Lives of Syrians examines the three dimensions of the architecture of precarity: Syrian migrants' legal status, the spaces in which they live and work, and their movements within and outside Turkey. The difficulties they face include restricted access to education and healthcare, struggles to secure employment, language barriers, identity-based discrimination, and unlawful deportations. Feyzi Baban, Suzan Ilcan, and Kim Rygiel show that Syrians confront their precarious conditions by engaging in cultural production and community-building activities, and by undertaking perilous journeys to Europe, allowing them to claim spaces and citizenship while asserting their rights to belong, to stay, and to escape. The authors draw on migration policies, legal and scholarly materials, and five years of extensive field research with local, national, and international humanitarian organizations, and with Syrians from all walks of life. The Precarious Lives of Syrians offers a thoughtful and compelling analysis of migration precarity in our contemporary context.

Abstract This article analyses the international migrations and statuses of people who left Syria after the outbreak of the civil war. In addition to exploring the dynamics of Syrian refugee migrations since 2011, we also discuss future prospects and possibilities of return. The ambition of the article is twofold. First, we aim to develop and nuance the typology of migrations of Syrians. Secondly, the article seeks to explore useful lessons from former large-scale refugee migrations; that is, knowledge which may hopefully contribute to preparing the relevant institutions and organisations for Syrian migrations in the eventual post-war period. Based on experiences from other post-conflict situations, several possible future scenarios of Syrian migrations are discussed. The proposed typologies of migrants and repatriation regimes may help us understand the nuances, the dynamic of status change and the complexity of the forced migrations. It is maintained that migration trends, reception, and repatriation conditions and policies are highly interconnected. Refugees’ responses to reception and repatriation regimes result in transitions in their legal statuses in receiving countries and changing motivations for migration and repatriation.

I examine the pattern of selection on education of asylum seekers recently arrived in Germany from five key source countries: Afghanistan, Albania, Iraq, Serbia, and Syria. The analysis relies on original individual-level data collected in Germany combined with surveys conducted at origin. The results reveal a positive pattern of selection on education for asylum seekers who were able to flee Iraq and Syria, and the selection is neutral for individuals seeking asylum from Afghanistan and negative for asylum seekers from Albania and Serbia. I provide an interpretation of these patterns based on differences in the expected length of stay at destination, the migration costs faced by asylum seekers to reach Germany, and the size of migration networks at destination.

How do migrants decide when to leave? Conventional wisdom is that violence and economic deprivation force migrants to leave their homes. However, long-standing problems of violence and poverty often cannot explain sudden spikes in migration. We study the timing of migration decisions in the critical case of Syrian and Iraqi migration to Europe using an original survey and embedded experiment, as well as interviews, focus groups, and Internet search data. We find that violence and poverty lead individuals to invest in learning about the migration environment. Political shifts in receiving countries then can unleash migratory flows. The findings underscore the need for further research on what migrants know about law and politics, when policy changes create and end migrant waves, and whether politicians anticipate migratory responses when crafting policy.

Background Despite broad interest of the Syrian refugee plight in the academic and media circles, there are still limited studies analyzing the lived experiences of torture survivors under the Syrian regime. This qualitative study interviewed torture survivors to examine the form and function of the Syrian regime’s security apparatus, and the personal aftermath of survivors. Methods Thirteen in-depth interviews were conducted in Arabic with Syrian refugees who endured torture. Study participants were at least 19 years of age, resided as refugees in Jordan, and voluntarily agreed to participate in the study. Participation was anonymous and no incentives were provided. Only oral consent was required. Audio-recorded interviews were transcribed and translated to English, and then analyzed for repetitive themes utilizing the narrative approach. Results Major themes were observed across three experience-phases: pre-captivity, during captivity, and post-captivity. The pre-captivity phase included two sub-themes: the Syrian regime’s initial detection and arrest system, and the intelligence system. The captivity phase was also divided into two sub-themes: environmental conditions in detention facilities, and torture methods including physical and psychological torture. Some of the environmental conditions in detention facilities included lack of sanitation, crowding, starvation, and withholding of medical care. Torture methods encompassed beatings, electric shocks, nail-pulling, hanging, drowning, suffocation, rape, and the witnessing of killing, sexual assault, or torture of others. The post-captivity phase included their release from captivity, escaping Syria, and post-displacement conditions and activism. Conclusions The Syrian regime employs a vast security apparatus to track, detain, interrogate, torture, and subjugate its civilian population. A systematic mechanism commences even before captivity and continues for years after release, with negative implications on the well-being of survivors, their families, and the Syrian people as a collective community. The Syrian war saw a shift toward mass detention, torture as a form of social punishment, subjugation, and indeterminate imprisonment. Intervention agencies, host countries, and policymakers must be informed of survivors’ experiences to better address their needs. Moreover, the international community must advocate for a firm stance against torture, demand justice, and prosecute all parties engaged in perpetuating such extreme forms of suffering and trauma.

UNHCR, the world's largest humanitarian organization charged with assisting displaced people globally, estimates over 60 per cent of refugees now live in urban areas. This book explores how UNHCR's approach to urban displacement has changed since the 1990s through an in-depth study of how UNHCR works and conceives its role in global politics today.

In late 2015, a survey called Displaced Persons in Austria Survey was carried out in and around Vienna to study the socio-demographic characteristics, values and attitudes of refugees arriving in Austria in 2015. In that year, the number of persons seeking refuge in Europe was substantially high, with Austria being the fourth largest receiving country of asylum-seekers in Europe. This data collection is the first of its kind in Austria and to our knowledge the first in Europe focusing on the recent arrivals of Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan refugees. First results on human capital and attitudes of respondents have been published recently. This article presents the methodological approach of collecting these data, experiences from survey preparation, and insights from the field phase. Findings address four key challenges faced by surveys of the highly mobile and vulnerable group of asylum-seekers, namely (1) representativity, (2) language barriers, (3) ethical considerations, and (4) cultural diversity. We discuss concrete solutions and recommendations for similar (inter)national, cross-cultural surveys, and provide insights for planning longitudinal studies on displaced persons who recently arrived in Europe.

The socially engrained notion that motherhood is essential to womanhood is strongly portrayed in how states view women's political participation through their reproductive capacities. In Lebanon, the state's political agenda influences laws and policies that restrict or encourage women's procreation, depending on their nationality, sect, marital, and legal status. Since 1943, Lebanon's system of proportionally allocating parliamentary seats to sectarian political parties, based on their population size, has spurred fears of demographic changes across sects. This fear is also referenced by politicians as the reason why Lebanese women are legally denied their rights of passing citizenship on to their children and non-Lebanese spouses. With Lebanon holding the highest refugee population per capita in the world, the fear of disturbing the \"sectarian balance\" directly collides with the reproductive autonomy of both Syrian and Palestinian refugee women. Migrant women living in Lebanon are also restricted to playing out their role as workers and therefore have their sexual and reproductive health and rights denied. Another fear of the state is that of changing moral values, whereby motherhood and parenthood in single women, queer, transgender, and intersex persons are perceived as deviant and a threat to traditional values. This review aims to display how, through fear - of changing moral values and demographic shifts - the Lebanese state practices reproductive oppression on part of the population, while neglecting them and exacerbating their difficult living conditions.