RISEE: Refugee Integration in South East Europe
About
RISEE: Refugee Integration in South East Europe collects qualitative interview data with civil society actors in Greece, the Western Balkans and Romania. The project explores refugees’ situation in the region, subsequent challenges throughout the COVID pandemic, existent service provision, as well as refugees’ integration. It looks at first-entry asylum-claiming states, transitory non-EU countries and relocation-receiving EU member states.
As a ‘relocation-sending’ country, Greece is of interest due to the large number of refugee entries and the sizable number of relocations it put forward to other EU member states in 2015.
As a ‘relocation-receiving’ country, Romania is of interest for several reasons: it settled few refugees after the adoption of the relocation mechanism; and it initially voted against the relocation scheme in 2015, although it ended up adopting it later.
Many refugees arriving to Greece do not lodge their asylum applications nor do they wait to be relocated to another EU country. In fact, thousands of migrants are leaving Greece to cross the non-EU Western Balkan states and to re-enter the EU at the Bosnian/Croatian border. Croatia is geographically closer to Northern Europe, the preferred destination of most migrants. Bosnia and Herzegovina are part of a pocket of non-EU states surrounded by EU members, namely Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Croatia, hence constituting a popular transitory state.
Research Goals
Assess refugees’ situation post arrival, their access to service provision and subsequent integration processes in South-East Europe
Explore how service provision in the region changed throughout the COVID pandemic
Understand civil society interpretations of interstate shared responsibility in relation to the EU’s relocation system for internally re-distributing refugees
Assess the degree to which mechanisms of responsibility-sharing inform the EU/non-EU transitory phenomena, thus encouraging a portion of migrants and refugees to exit EU territory only to re-enter it later
Assess the refugee absorption capacity and the asylum service delivery of a first entry state (i.e., Greece); relocation-receiving countries (i.e., Romania and Croatia); as well as transitory EU (i.e., Romania; Croatia) and non-EU states (i.e., Bosnia and Herzegovina)