Central and Eastern European Migration Review

This article reflects on the role that Hungary has played with respect to the Ukrainian refugee crisis. It elaborates on two issues. The first is Hungary’s relatively amicable relationship with Russia and how the Hungarian political elite has approached the Ukrainian crisis in view of its domestic political goals. The second is the migration policy that Hungary adopted when faced with the arrival of irregular Middle Eastern refugees and the mitigations in this policy to respond to the Ukrainian arrivals. The paper discusses the evolution in the governance of migration in Hungary and the actors and the politics underpinning the Hungarian reception policy from the perspective of these two issues. In this context, it draws on the literature on leadership and how the latter affects political contexts and social realities, particularly with respect to migration politics.

The turn of the century has brought the issue of internal displacement to the forefront of the international agenda, recognising it as a matter of global concern. Scholarly research has also taken an interest, examining important aspects such as the integration of internally displaced persons into their resettlement areas. This paper examines the case of Greek-Cypriot ‘refugees’, a population which has experienced internal displacement for the past 50 years. Despite enjoying certain privileges granted by the Greek-Cypriot government and sharing a common language, religion and cultural practices with the non-displaced population, oral narratives collected and analysed in this study reveal a complex interaction with non-refugees during resettlement. These narratives highlight the challenges of internal displacement and emphasise that a shared ethnicity alone is insufficient to ensure social inclusion. In order to comprehend these complexities, the paper sought to engage with theories of refugee integration, with this engagement revealing the limitations of indicator-oriented conceptualisations in cases of internal displacement. The way in which these oral narratives contradict an observable indicator such as ethnicity is a point which we should take into serious consideration.

Migrant integration remains a continuous challenge in many EU countries, as shown by the retreat from multiculturalism and the concerns regarding Muslim migrants. In recent years, the increase in asylum-seekers has added further complexities to the issue. Meanwhile, volunteering is considered to be an important aspect of today’s society and a thermometer of civic well-being. Bringing together the field of migration studies and research on volunteering, we investigate whether volunteering would foster processes of integration and intercultural relations. We do so by presenting an innovative empirical study based on interviews and self-administered questionnaires conducted at two points in time over a period of about a year in a specific setting that brought together EU and third-country nationals in volunteering activities in six European contexts. Thus, we are able to provide an in-depth account of volunteering experiences and their effects on intercultural relations and processes of integration. The research highlights how volunteering fosters social interactions, intersecting with dynamics of inclusion. It is a valuable tool that strengthens the community as well as the process of social integration, helping to overcome the tensions and conflicts that persist in European societies. At the same time, we argue that volunteering cannot make up for all integration challenges since the process of societal integration requires a more comprehensive approach which includes tackling discrimination in structural integration.

Everyday spaces represent central platforms that provide opportunities for encounters marked by ethnic and cultural diversity, where transformations can be negotiated that rethink living together. The significance of these ‘third places’ has been extensively researched. Yet, some spaces such as public libraries continue to be largely overlooked by geographers. Public libraries also remain under-appreciated within wider society despite their obvious social functions. Central here is that public libraries can be understood as dynamic and ‘lived spaces’ that enable the emergence of transient connections and relationships. Such spaces are increasingly sparse within modern cities. This paper explores the potential of everyday spaces of encounter, specifically public libraries, to facilitate the unfolding of ‘light’ connections and relationships, nurturing more inclusive forms of urban togetherness and belonging in multi-ethnic societies and the significance that people attribute to these often mundane encounters and micro connections. In so doing, this paper combines findings from two research projects that investigate mixed or intercultural encounters in public libraries in Bremen (Germany) and Glasgow (Scotland).

Governments make assumptions about immigrants and then craft policies based on those assumptions to yield what they hope will be effective naturalisation outcomes: state security and trustworthy citizens. This study examines the thoughts, experiences and opinions about citizenship and civic engagement, drawing on a dataset of 150 one-hour interviews with permanent residents and naturalised citizens in New York and Berlin in 2004–2010 and again 2016–2020. It includes those who have naturalised or hold immigration statuses necessary for naturalisation (i.e., those who can and will naturalise, those who can but will not naturalise and those rejected for naturalisation or who do not meet eligibility requirements). I explore how immigrants participate as citizens and privileged non-citizens. My findings include the fact that immigrants define civic engagement – what ‘citizen’ participation means and who participates – more broadly and narrowly than anticipated. Immigrant perceptions of naturalisation and what becoming a citizen meant to them, and how naturalisation personally affected modes of participation. Defensive citizenship stimulated naturalisation but was deemed insufficient in contemporary New York and Berlin to protect immigrants and their engagement. State-designed naturalisation processes ignore immigrants’ perspectives and performative modes of citizenship and, thus, ineffectively select the citizens states say they want.

This discussion was held in April 2020 as a part of the Volpower Academic Workshop: Challenging Integration through Everyday Narratives. This is a creative effort to involve a live discussion and reflection on the theme and studies of integration in this special issue. It brings together Adrian Favell, Kesi Mahendran, Jenny Phillimore, and Jon Fox as established scholars and critiques of policy and research in the integration field in discussion with each other while queried by Peter Scholten.

This short introduction presents the context and background information to the CEEMR special section analysing the migration dynamics, trajectories, everyday reality and policies in the context of Russian full-scale aggression against Ukraine. The special section contains the first group of articles dealing with the unprecedented migration consequences of military aggression against Ukraine, including air strikes on many Ukrainian cities, the use of indiscriminate weapons, killing and deportations as well as the economic consequences of protracted armed conflict. The intensity of the migration movement should also be explained by the quick opening by neighbouring countries of their borders to the incoming refugees. The exceptionality of the situation and high uncertainty about further developments led us to conclude that this special section should not follow  any prior conceptual background but should be open to different perspectives and approaches in studying migration from/in/to Ukraine.

The purpose of this paper is to define, through content and frame analysis, the peculiarities in the representation of Ukrainian internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Ukraine’s local media and to compare this case with previous findings about the general peculiarities of perceptions of IDPs in the mass media. Two Ukrainian news sites were studied (2014–2018), giving a total 328 news items. My study revealed that the mass media do not differentiate between the terms ‘refugee’ and IDP and describe these latter as passive people (174 mentions as opposed to 77 mentions for active people). However, in the Ukrainian case, IDPs were in the top three of the most popular sources at the beginning of the resettlement (2014–2015). Later, the coverage became an episodic one, with publications about the topic typically having only one source – officials. The mass media preferred such frames as: ‘generalisation’, ‘victim’ and ‘help-receiver’. The ‘threat’ frame was less often used; however, some aggressive and manipulative phrases were disseminated. A ‘criminal’ frame was not at all popular. Thus, the local press may be an important forum for IDPs; Ukrainian journalists were interested in their stories although the coverage needs some improvement (a more ‘active’ angle, clear reference to IDPs as IDPs and not refugees and stories of socialisation etc.).

This article assesses the situation of forced migrants from Ukraine in European countries. I use data from the Statistical Bureaux and sociological institutions of Ukraine and recipient countries and from international organisations. Semi-structured interviews with experts were conducted in order to expand the information base of the research and obtain more substantiated analytical results and the trends of forced migration from Ukraine since 24 February 2022 were investigated. An attempt was made to explain the difference between the data from various sources regarding the migration of Ukrainians caused by the Russian war against Ukraine. The hierarchy of problems of forced migrants from Ukraine is determined on the base of in-depth interviews of experts. An attempt was made to estimate the impact of the forced migration of Ukrainians on local markets of goods and services. The recommendations for minimising the irreversible migration losses of the population of Ukraine are developed.