Europe and the Refugee Crisis: Local Responses to Migrants

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Since 2014, more than 60 million people have been displaced from their homes across the Middle East and Africa. The European Refugee Crisis, as it has come to be known, is now the largest such crisis since the aftermath of World War II. How have local communities reacted to the influx of asylum seekers And what can we learn from their responses Frances Trix here offers a wide-ranging ethnographical and anthropological study of local, individual responses to refugees, from Macedonia to Germany. Based on extensive interviews and field work in Europe, Trix focuses for the first time on the ways that refugees have been welcomed or not, as the case may be by various individuals and communities. Her work ranges from Macedonians who established an NGO and lobbied to allow the refugees to use the train, to the police charged with border management; from a German organic food store owner who by her actions set the positive tone in her village, a retired IT manager who coordinates refugee volunteers for his entire town, to the district work organisation director who deems refugees unsuitable for multiple reasons. The material is measured throughout against Trixs anthropological experience, as well as reference to the historical and political contexts in which events are unfolding. This book is essential reading for all those working on the refugee crisis and the prospects both local and global for the future.

Author Bio

Frances Trix is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Indiana University and Distinguished Senior Scholar at the Center for the Study of the Middle East. She has been the recipient of a number of distinguished grants and was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Istanbul, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Albanian American National Association. In the winter of 201516, she spent time working in refugee transit camps on the Macedonian border and is the author of numerous books, including Urban Muslim Migrants in Istanbul (2016) with I.B.Tauris.