Active Refugee Admission Policies in Europe: Exploring an Emerging Research Field

Resettlement and other active refugee admission policies are high on the international, the EU’s and national agendas. The UN Global Compacts put safe and orderly migration, access to protection as well as responsibility-sharing centre-stage. The EU is negotiating a common framework for resettlement and humanitarian admission programmes. Several European countries are expanding existing programmes or introducing new ones. Traditional resettlement is only one of several active refugee admission policies (ARAPs), alongside, for instance, humanitarian admission, private sponsorship, and scholarship programmes. Often subsumed under the term ‘resettlement’, ARAPs reshape the political objectives, target groups and actor constellations of traditional resettlement. The diverse forms ARAPs take in the European context limits the generalizability of previous research, mostly focusing on traditional resettlement countries like Canada, the United States and Australia. This begs a number of questions that cut across various disciplines and methodological approaches. To develop a better empirical, theoretical and conceptual understanding of ARAPs as a specific form of refugee protection, this workshop aims to bring together researchers from different disciplines and interested practitioners. The workshop serves as the kick-off event for the newly founded working group ‘Active Refugee Admission Policies’ within the German Network of Forced Migration Research. Besides taking stock of individual research projects and common themes across them, the workshop will also offer a space to discuss conceptual, theoretical and methodological challenges of researching ARAPs and potential avenues for collective research projects and publications. There will also be time to present and discuss participants’ research projects at different stages.