Syrian Refugee Children in the Middle East and Europe

A timely contribution to the critical academic debate on the refugee emergency of the last few years, this new book by Michelle Pace and Somdeep Sen sheds light to the plight and challenges of Syrian refugee children. While offering new data and insights on specific integration issues such as education and rights, the book is innovative also in its approach to identity, agency and resilience of refugee children and their families. A must read for researchers, policy makers and media professionals working in the field of asylum and migration in Europe today. Anna Triandafyllidou, Professor at the Global Governance Programme (GGP) of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS), European University Institute.

Syrian Refugee Children in the Middle East and Europe is a thoroughly researched, compassionate, and deep exploration of the protection issues faced by Syrian children with clear ideas about how the issues can be addressed. Highly readable, each chapter looks at the plight and possibilities of displaced Syrians from a distinctive and valuable lens. This book is a must-read for any development, stabilization, or humanitarian response professional working on Syria, as well as for donors, the United Nations, academics, and conflict analysts. While the focus is Syrian children, anyone with an interest in conflict resolution and refugee populations anywhere would benefit reading Syrian Refugee Children. Martha Myers, former Country Director for Save the Children/Syria and CARE/Palestine

In 2012, a year into the Syrian ‘humanitarian crisis, UNICEF issued a statement that there must be ’no lost generation’ of Syrians. Yet aside from that declaration there was little action and even less research into how to proceed. This volume edited by Pace and Sen is a seminal work and makes a significant contribution to a steadily growing literature about Syria and its refugees. Focussing on the under 18 year olds, Pace and Sen takes as their starting point the ‘desecuritizing’ of the discourse around Syrian refugee children. The volume identifies the manner in which Syrian refugee youth possess a certain agency and may become the embodiment and potential of the future if properly nurtured. With chapters looking at young Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Denmark and the Netherlands it addresses the inherent agency of young refugees and highlights the violence, fear uncertainty and loss which they suffer as well as the potential for safeguarding their future and their well-being. Dawn Chatty, Universtiy of Oxford

Syrian Refugee Children is a powerful and carefully researched work that argues for humanity and its unbounded potential. At its core, this book is about possibility and hope, making visible and indisputable the agency of refugee children and the fact that Syria’s future ultimately resides in them. A substantive study of immense importance, Syrian Refugee Children will stand as a definitive work on its subject. Sara Roy, Harvard University

Beyond bringing together very valuable contributions not only to the field of refugee studies and the crucial issue of refugee children, Pace and Sen manage to provoke essential debates about our responsibility in the ‘refugee crisis’. Based on fieldwork among refugee children and other stakeholders, the chapters deliver poignant stories which cannot but move the reader. Leaving states in war and chaos, children with or without their families end up in detention centers, parked as sub-humans, deprived from their most basic human rights in the name of the ‘state of exception’, finding themselves in limbo in terms of citizenship. The book is not just a harsh critique of the increased securitization of European migration policies, their consequences and of the obstacles that European institutions establish in front of refugees. It is also a constructive exploration of what could be done to improve integration processes by paying attention to lessons learnt and unlearnt in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and elsewhere.Eric Komlavi Hahonou, Associate Professor of International Development Studies, Roskilde University.

This book stands out by virtue of its ambition and achievement of writing about an urgent matter of concern, namely Syrian Refugee Children, their lives, agency and possibilities of finding a new home in another country. In this effort the editors have succeeded in bringing together a vast array of people across different nationalities, including authors with a deep knowledge of Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, and of diverse professional backgrounds too, hoping for the book and the process of making it to form part of an ongoing dialogue within research and practice communities that could enable Syrian refugee children to thrive in their diasporic lives. Conceptually, the book strikes a difficult balance between acknowledging the vulnerability of the Syrian refugee children and at the same time write about them as agentic individuals, thereby reflecting the ambition of the editors of doing activist research not only in the choice of research but in writing about it too. The book, as a result, is an exemplar of precisely activist research which is relevant and interesting to multiple audiences. Dr Lotte Buch Segal, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen.