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Abstract

Disputing a hard and fast distinction between migrants and refugees, this book highlights how changing legal arrangements as well as people's varying statuses make the concept of 'refugee' a dynamic one.

The book assesses the multiple ways in which religion plays a role in prompting people to flee and seek refuge as well as in their accommodation. Understanding religion from a material and corporeal angle, the chapters address the ways in which refugees practice their religion – Islam, Christianity, Buddhism – convert or develop new faiths, as well as how secular institutions in Europe frame and determine what is religion and what is not religion according to the law, delineate the limits of religious authority, religious practice and religious speech.

Politically the issue of refugees has been responded to by a nationalist upsurge across Europe, where the question of nationalism and migration has been shaping the political landscape for more than a decade. This volume places the current trajectories of people who flee from oppression, conflict and a host of other reasons and who are seeking refuge in Europe in a broader historical and comparative perspective. In so doing, it addresses past experiences with accommodating refugees, in the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia, World War II and in the context of the Cold War, which are usually barely discussed and tend to be 'forgotten' in current debates