Examining resettlement practices worldwide and drawing on contributions from anthropology, law, international relations, social work, political science, and numerous other disciplines, this ground-breaking volume highlights the conflicts between refugees’ needs and state practices, and assesses international, regional and national perspectives on resettlement, as well as the bureaucracies and ideologies involved. It offers a detailed understanding of resettlement, from the selection of refugees to their long-term integration in resettling states, and highlights the relevance of a lifespan approach to resettlement analysis.

In recent years, the United States has admitted an increasingly diverse group of refugees and other humanitarian cases with a diverse set of needs. There seems to be broad consensus that the U.S. refugee resettlement assistance system is not adequately meeting the needs of these new arrivals and is ripe for reform. The National Security Council is leading an interagency review of refugee resettlement, the forthcoming results of which may further energize reform efforts. To help inform possible future efforts to reform the refugee resettlement assistance system, this report discusses existing resettlement assistance programs, key challenges and issues in providing effective assistance, and policy options to reform the current system.

This edited volume brings together scholars from various disciplines to discuss how language is used by, for, and about refugees in the United States in order to deepen our understanding of what ‘refugee’ and ‘resettlement’ mean. The main themes of the chapters highlight: the intersections of language education and refugee resettlement from community-based adult programs to elementary school classrooms; the language (of) resettlement policies and politics in the United States at both the national level and at the local level focusing on the agencies and organizations that support refugees; the discursive constructions of refugee-hood that are promulgated through the media, resettlement agencies, and even the refugees themselves. This volume is highly relevant to current political debates of immigration, human rights, and education, and will be of interest to researchers of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, and cultural studies.

While the world’s refugee population reaches record high numbers, countries offering third-country resettlement are increasingly shifting toward policies of exclusion and austerity. This edited volume envisions a more humane future for refugee resettlement. Combining anthropology with a variety of professional perspectives (education, health care, theology, administration, politics, and social work) ethnography is used to demonstrate the efficacy of programs and interventions that create and nurture social capital in culturally specific and accessible ways. The contributors present case studies of resettlement in the United States, England, Australia, and Canada and contend that social networks have an essential role—are the crux—in the reconfigurations of refugee well-being, belonging, and place-making vis-à-vis the bureaucratic limitations of state and institutional factors. This book includes short contributions from refugees, representatives of resettlement organizations, and government officials, including Jhuma N. Acharya, Bimala Bastola, Khada Bhandari, Kiri Hata, Govin Magar, Madhu Neupane, Natacha Nikokeza, Angela K. Plummer, Lance Rasbridge, Chris Sunderlin, David Thatcher, and John Tluang.