The Syrian war, the 21st century’s most protracted and second-deadliest conflict, has driven 5.6 million refugees and 6.6 million internally displaced into flight. As the civil war draws to a close, an autopsy of this historic and unprecedented refugee episode becomes feasible. Why did the war generate so many refugees? How did so many of them get to Europe? Who are these people, and why did they leave? From whom were they fleeing and why? Did European policymakers alleviate or aggravate the refugee crisis? The Syrian Refugee Crisis argues that Syrian forced migration has been deeply misunderstood. Against conventional wisdom, it suggests that refugees engaged smugglers not just as traffickers or criminal exploiters but as natural allies and means to affirm asylum rights; that the politicization of refugees according to major actors’ foreign policy priorities obfuscated the role of US and European foreign policy in generating massive displacement; and that restrictionist border policies on the Balkan Route were inhumane, incoherent, and counter-productive. Relying on extensive, rare fieldwork data from five countries comprising the Balkan Route (Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Serbia, and Germany), this book sheds light on the understudied, counter-intuitive, and often-misunderstood dynamics of forced migration, refugee agency, border restrictionism, anti-smuggling policy, and migrant decision-making in the 21st century.

The book delves into a data-driven apolitical perspective of the migration problem in Turkey with the challenges that the Turkish government and international NGOs have had to confront in providing public services; notably, education and health to Syrian refugees in camps, public schools and clinics around the country.

This book examines the unfolding of the Syrian refugee crisis in relation to the spillover of the Syrian civil war in Lebanon and against the background of Lebanon–Syria relations and Lebanon’s socio-political, cultural, legal, and economic conditions. It surveys Lebanon’s response plans to the refugee crisis as part of the development of the international response plans to address the protection and needs of the Syrian refugees and Palestinian refugees from Syria, as well as the impacted host communities and institutions. At the same time, this book emphasizes the dramatic shift in popular and institutional attitudes towards the refugees as a response to and as a growth of the sheer magnitude of the refugee crisis, which made Lebanon the only country in modern history with the highest per capita concentration of refugees in the world. By examining these attitudes against the background of achievements and failures of the response plans, the impact of the crisis on state institutions on the local and national levels, and the collective consciousness of a nation barely surviving the scars of its civil war, this book not only underscores the deepening tragedy of Syrian and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, but also the consequential tragedy of many Lebanese, who have been forced into poverty and whose livelihoods have been affected by insecurity and the almost complete collapse of social services. As a result, the tragedy of the Syrian refugee crisis has become an international crisis affecting vulnerable persons across nationalities, and, unless it is addressed diplomatically and its response plans sufficiently funded, the tragedy will only deepen across continents.

When the Syrian uprising began in March 2011, no one envisioned mass atrocities on the scale we are witnessing today. Today, more than half of the Syrian population has been displaced, a phenomenon almost without precedent in human history. Images of starving civilians trapped in besieged cities have outraged the human conscience. Thousands of children have been slain by barrel bombs, landmines and chlorine gas. These numbers are a shameful indictment on humanity. Yet, there is hope. Each day, in refugee camps across the Middle East, aid workers, seeking neither recognition nor reward, sacrifice their comfort to bring Syrian refugees relief. This book, tracking the author's travels to Syrian refugee camps and informal tented settlements in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, answers that burning question on so many people's minds: How can I help? The author shows that there is a role anyone can play in making a lasting, positive impact on Syrian refugees and restoring dignity to their lives.

This edited volume investigates the political and socioeconomic impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on Lebanon and Jordan, and these countries’ mechanisms to cope with the rapid influx of refugees. The sudden population increase has resulted in severe pressures on infrastructures and services, as well as growing social tensions between the refugees and host communities. These chapters use a transdisciplinary approach to analyse the repercussions of the humanitarian tragedy at three different levels: 1) the changing governmental policies of the two countries towards the crisis; 2) the different perceptions of the Jordanian and Lebanese local communities on the Syrian refugees; and 3) the role played by NGOs and the civil society in both countries in dealing with protracted humanitarian emergencies.

The Syrian refugee crisis, which began in 2011, is one of the most pressing disasters in the world today, with its effects reverberating around the globe. By the end of 2015, more than 7.6 million of the country’s people had been internally displaced and 4.3 million were registered refugees. The number of internally displaced persons and refugees amounts to about half of Syria’s precrisis population. Thousands have died while trying to reach safety. Due to the large humanitarian response, there is now a wealth of available information on refugees’ income and expenses, food and nutrition, health, education, employment, vulnerability, housing, and other measures of well-being. These data have been little explored, as humanitarian organizations face daily challenges that make the full use of existing data very difficult. The Welfare of Syrian Refugees: Evidence from Jordan and Lebanon aims to assess the poverty and vulnerability of these refugees and evaluate existing and alternative policies designed to help them. The authors find that current policies, including cash transfers and food vouchers, are effective in reducing poverty, but fail to lead to— nor are they designed to yield—economic inclusion and self-reliance. Those goals would require a different humanitarian and development paradigm, one that focuses on growth policies for areas affected by refugees where the target population has a mix of refugees and hosting populations. This volume is the result of the first comprehensive collaboration between the World Bank Group and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and aims to better understand and ultimately improve the well-being of Syrian refugees living in Jordan and Lebanon.

The global political economy is currently in the midst of a refugee crisis, one that is complex and that remains poorly researched and under-theorized within both economics and political science. There is little understanding of the many diverse situations that led to it, and refugees are all too often included in the category of forced migrants.

This book explores how 21st-century media-based discourses on migrants, refugees, and displaced people both reinforce and reconfigure existing negative stereotypes about these groups as 'other.' It is particularly pertinent considering the increasingly polarized world context and the evolving communication ecosystem with new media as privileged platforms for exclusionary narratives toward the 'outgroups' of migrants, refugees, and displaced people. The book's contributions encompass various methodologies and disciplines within communication studies, including qualitative analyses of media representations and quantitative research on public opinion. Unlike much of the existing English-language scholarship on these marginalized communities, this book de-centers North America and the UK to offer a global perspective focusing on regions such as continental and eastern Europe, the Middle East and Persian Gulf, India, China, Turkey, Russia, and Scandinavia. Rui Alexandre Novais is Professor and Researcher at the Centre for Philosophical and Humanistic Studies (CEFH) of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Portugal). Carlos Arcila Calderón is an Associate Professor and member of the Observatory of Audiovisual Contents (OCA) of the University of Salamanca (Spain).