‘Leaving Afghanistan! Are you sure?’ European efforts to deter potential migrants through information campaigns

Policymakers in Europe are currently under pressure to both lessen the number of incoming asylum-seekers and ‘irregular migrants’ and address the humanitarian crises occurring at Europe’s border crossings. Increasingly, we see an externalization of Europe’s border controls, as migration management policies try to stop migrants before they even arrive in Europe. One form of externalized control is information campaigns, discouraging would-be migrants and asylum-seekers from leaving their countries of origin. Such campaigns intend to inform potential migrants about the difficulties of settling in Europe and the dangers of being smuggled. As such, these campaigns aim to both discourage migration and present that discouragement as a means of protecting people from financial and bodily risk. I examine the use of information campaigns in Afghanistan, and ask why they are continued, when ethnographic work with Afghans suggests that the campaigns are unlikely to be believed. I argue that these information campaigns are symbolic, fulfilling the need of policymakers to be seen to be doing something, and also – and more ominously – serve a role of shifting responsibility for the risks of the journey onto Afghans themselves, rather than the restrictive border regimes of the EU

Can Afghans reintegrate after assisted return from Europe?

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Impact as Odyssey

Within the context of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), academic labor is being tagged to ‘impact’: to demonstrable outputs that go beyond academia and benefit “the wider economy and society” (HEFCE, 2009, 13; see also Rogers et al., this issue). This move is certainly not new, nor is it unique to institutions of higher education in the UK. ‘Impact statements’ have been standard in funding proposals for quite a while, grant funded projects have long required evidence of application within the communities where research occurs and, in the US, ‘service’ to institutional, professional, and broader communities is well established as one of the metrics used in governing promotion and tenure processes. In this intervention, we reflect on our experience working on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project where questions of impact – understood as efforts to engage participants and to produce applied results – were an ongoing concern. We offer a vision that recognizes that producing impact in research is a complicated process where alternatives to what some describe as the “wholesale neoliberalization of knowledge production” (Jazeel, 2010, np) might potentially be realized. More specifically, we offer an allegorical rendering of impact as odyssey

Forced to leave? The discursive and analytical significance of describing migration as forced and voluntary

This article examines voluntariness in migration decisions by promoting the acknowledgement of forced and voluntary migration as a continuum of experience, not a dichotomy. Studies on conflict-related migration and migration, in general, remain poorly connected, despite calls for interaction. This reflects the forced–voluntary dichotomy's stickiness within and beyond academia, which is closely connected to the political implications of unsettling it and potentially undermining migrants’ protection rights. We delve into notions of the ‘voluntariness’ of migration and argue for the analytical need to relate evaluations of voluntariness to available alternatives. Drawing on qualitative research with people from Afghanistan and Pakistan coming to Europe, we hone in on three particular renderings of migration: migrants’ own experiences, scholarly qualitative observations and labelling by immigration authorities. Analysing migration as stages in a process: leaving – journey (and transit) – arrival and settlement – return or onward migration, we highlight the specific effects of migration being described as being forced or voluntary. Labelling as ‘forced’ (or not) matters to migrants and states when asylum status is on the line. For migration scholars, it remains challenging to decouple these descriptions from state systems of migration management; though doing so enhances our understanding of the role voluntariness plays in migration decisions

Higher education as a complementary pathway to protection for Afghan students: historical and current experiences, and thoughts for the future

Third-country education as a complementary pathway to protection is an area of refugee policy that has expanded under the Global Compact on Refugees. This paper explores the possibilities of higher (tertiary) education as a pathway to protection for Afghan students and provides an opportunity to share some personal reflections on the events of August and September 2021 in relation to Afghans set to study in the United Kingdom under the Chevening Scholarship programme, which highlights some of the challenges of using training programmes as a route to refugee protection. The authors suggest that education is a possible pathway to protection for a small subset of Afghans, in practice implementation is complex and often ad hoc, and it should not be used by Western governments as a political justification for eroding or erasing other routes to protection

Networks of asylum support in the UK and USA: a handbook of ideas, strategies and best practice for asylum support groups in a challenging social and economic climate

Asylum Network Project Repor

Mentoring returnees: study on reintegration outcomes through a comparative lens

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Possibilities and realities of return migration

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A Stranger at Home : Integration, Transnationalism and the Afghan Elite

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo