Selecting Refugees for Resettlement to Norway and Canada: Vulnerability, Integration and Discretion
Thursday, October 31, 2024 3pm to 4:30pm
About this Event
Central Campus
This lecture examines how the concept of vulnerability is “translated” from legal bureaucratic discourses into actual policy and practice in the refugee resettlement context. In particular, we trace how the integration potential of refugees continues to be weighed against their vulnerabilities in the process. While resettlement is a voluntary commitment and not legally binding, states that have signed the 1951 Geneva Convention have agreed to share the responsibility of providing protection and solutions for refugees who cannot return to their country of origin. Through a comparative discussion of refugee resettlement in Canada and Norway, we shed light on some mechanisms through which the humanitarian focus on prioritizing the most vulnerable comes under pressure from competing political considerations and rationales. By examining instances of what we call the political or ‘tactical’ uses of resettlement, we aim not only to highlight its partisan and domestic political dynamics but also to open up questions of who is ultimately left behind and considered ‘too vulnerable’ for resettlement.
Dagmar Soennecken is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy & Administration at York University (Toronto, Canada). She is also cross-appointed to the Law & Society Program there. Her research focuses on comparative public policy in the EU and North America. She is particularly interested in questions concerning law and the courts as well as citizenship and migration, including refugees. In 2019, she became the Editor-in-Chief of Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees. Her work has been published in Comparative Migration Studies, Law & Policy, Droit et Société, Politics and Governance among others. She was one of the three Canadian co-investigators on the recently concluded VULNER project team.
Hosted by the Institute for European Studies and cosponsored by the Migrations Program, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and funded by the Mellon Foundation's Just Futures Initiative.
Event Details
See Who Is Interested
4 people are interested in this event
User Activity
No recent activity