Refugees in Britain: Practices of Hospitality and Labelling

The book offers a multi-faceted approach to assessing the British refugee regime, combining theories of hospitality and labelling with empirical research on government framing of the refugee. It provides three case studies on the asylum system from national, regional, and grass-roots levels, exploring power, identification, responsibility, language, and externalisation of refugee politics. The book argues that the British refugee regime has developed towards externalised humanitarian hospitality, geographically projecting beyond the state's territorial confines to control and exclude refugees. It also engages with counter-discourses by examining local practices of British hospitality and showing acts of solidarity that challenge the statist logic.

Format: Hardback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 30 June 2020
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

An empirical examination of contemporary refugee practices in Britain offers a novel theoretical framework that combines the theories of hospitality and labeling to explore the refugee regime. The research is underpinned by rich empirical material, including 34 interviews and 30+ years of archival research on government framing of the refugee. The book presents three empirically grounded case studies on the British asylum system from the national, regional, and grass-roots levels, providing a multi-faceted way of assessing the British approach to refuge on local, state, and regional levels. The book argues that the British refugee regime has developed towards an externalized humanitarian hospitality, whereby the practice is geographically projected beyond the territorial confines of the state in order to both control and exclude the refugee. It also engages with counter-discourses by examining local practices of British hospitality and showing acts of solidarity that challenge the statist logic. The result is a theoretically informed account of the British approach to externalization and geographical seclusion of refugees, particularly in response to the current Mediterranean Crisis.

Weight: 364g
Dimension: 143 x 222 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474447164