Politics of Subsidiarity in Refugee Reception

This book concentrates on the politics of allocation and dispersal, the involvement of non-state actors, the role of social workers and street level bureaucrats and the subversive nature of grassroots initiatives as far as reception policies and practices are concerned.

Mass migration entails multifaceted economic, political, social, and legal challenges and brings together a diversity of actors (e.g. state institutions, international and transnational organizations, non-governmental organisations, host communities and migrants) with unequal power and divergent priorities and interests. Much of the debate on migration is centred around the notion of ‘crisis’ and around its impact on the polarization of politics in especially Western countries. In this regard, migration as an overall topic has increasingly played a significant role in shaping the present and future of our societies. The chapters address these issues in a critical and analytical way by informing the reader about a particular case and linking the case to an analytical framework about the ways in which governance of reception takes place in Europe and beyond.

This book will be of great interest to upper-level students, researchers, and academics in Politics and International Relations. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies.

Ayhan Kaya is Professor of Politics, Director of Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, and a member of the Department of International Relations at Istanbul Bilgi University.

Alexander K. Nagel is Professor of the Social Scientific Study of Religion at the Institute of Sociology at Georg-August Göttingen University.