The author identifies what she calls a ‘niche opening’ within the increasingly repressive policies of control and containment of refugees in the UK and wider Europe: refugee children. She engages with Western discourses about childhood and vulnerability to show how, unlike other asylum seekers, refugee children are approached by the UK asylum regime as subjects with ‘citizenship potential’. Within the wider context of hostility there have been ‘niche openings’ for certain categories of asylum seekers who have been looked on more favourably because they fit with certain moral and humanitarian values and aims of European nations. One of these niche openings has been for refugee children. While in the UK asylum seekers are judged as lacking citizenship potential and typically rejected through abandonment, confinement or expulsion, children are regarded as an investment in the future of the nation; to be moulded into model citizens through protection and guidance. This proximity to citizenship is, however, not only partial due to assumptions about refugee children’s lack of agency but also temporary as it gets abruptly interrupted as refugee youth age out of childhood.

This chapter draws our attention to the complexities of protecting refugees and their rights within urban environments. As refugee crises become increasingly urbanised, protecting refugees becomes more complex. Unlike camp settings, urban environments are spatially fragmented and subject to various financial and political changes that are linked to, yet distinct from, those at the scale of the nation state. In cities in the Global South where much of urban displacement takes place, protecting refugees can be highly varied and subject to the whims of local communities and power brokers. Here, refugees share the same kinds of socio-economic struggles as the urban poor. Therefore, privileging one over the other can cause tensions and resentments among the local communities. The authors note that in such a condition, insisting on formulaic, rights-based approaches may be counter-productive. Rather, humanitarian organisations may benefit from working stealthily with local organisations, including state institutions, to insert protections for refugees into local by-laws. This may not be the model donors envision when funding humanitarian responses, but in an increasingly urban and dynamic world, there is a need to abandon earlier methods of protection and adopt tactics that tap into the needs and interests of local communities.

This chapter draws our attention to the politics of hosting refugees among Global South countries in an era of growing security concerns and diminishing power by the UN to protect the rights of refugees The author alerts us to the unevenness of the global humanitarian system whereby those countries who are often least equipped to host large numbers of refugees find themselves doing so over long periods of time. While countries in the Global South are tasked with hosting large numbers of refugees, their security concerns tend to be overlooked. They thus undertake problematic practices against displaced populations. The chapter focuses on how Bangladesh has hosted the Rohingya over the last several decades as Myanmar has engaged in repeated ethnic cleansing practices against them. The author looks at how in countries like Bangladesh there are attempts at trying to limit the numbers of refugees or repatriate them or resettle them in geographical problematic areas. The chapter shows us how, as a result of the diminishing power of the UN, a change in the geopolitical landscape of the world and the emphasis on security concerns, the rights of refugees continue to be eroded.

This chapter undertakes a critical analysis of Palestinian identity and displacement and its relationship to the sea. The author engages in an ethnographic analysis in which she challenges normative understandings of Palestinian refugees as coming from farming backgrounds (fellaheen). She shows us instead the lives of Palestinian refugees who were fishermen who were displaced to Lebanon. Her work not only illuminates to close relationship – both personal and professional – of these communities to the sea, but the complex political negotiations they have to engage in order to continue their trades and indeed stake a claim to territory through their nautical understandings. The chapter challenges the assumed identity of Palestinian refugees as being landed. It offers new ways of imagining pathways to refuge, spaces of refuge, and activities that communities undertake in exile.

The forms of publishing pursued by workshops were built upon intense local interest in the histories and experiences of ordinary people, which were also well received among radical and labour movement networks. This gave rise to an evangelism to encourage more people to take up writing. However, this model of a responsive readership was to be challenged in the 1980s with the weeding out of alternatives and the imposition of a limited idea of the market, which served to marginalise one version of working-class writing in the face of new demands for ‘quality’ writing. Yet, this was a two-way street in which there was an exchange of ideas between formal and informal approaches. This highlights the varied nature of markets and the way that, in certain circumstances, they could be moulded to democratic needs as well as representing an alien force to writers.

A significant body of written work was produced by older people in the 1970s and 1980s reflecting back on the early twentieth century. Through the individual voice, wider social contexts were explored. Writers focused upon some key themes in order to achieve this, including childhood, work, family, the individual and politics. The insistent belief in care and community in times of hardship is understood as a contradictory structure of feeling that spread widely during this time. Contrary to ideal-type definitions of community, a close reading of texts reveals actual meanings and practices that have often been ignored in the historical record. Silences and tensions are also explored.