YorkSpace

YorkSpace is York University's Institutional Repository. It supports York University's Senate Policy on Open Access by providing York community members with a place to preserve their research online in an institutional context.

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    Administrative inclusion without legal incorporation among Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in India
    (Springer Nature, 2026-06-11) Bhambu, Sachin
    This paper examines the conditions of prolonged displacement and legal ambiguity experienced by Sri Lankan Tamil refugees residing in the Puzhal camp in Chennai, India. Drawing on mixed-method data collected through household surveys (N = 30), semi-structured interviews, and field observations, the study analyses how administrative inclusion without substantive legal incorporation reproduces long-term precarity. Despite decades of residence in India, refugees continue to face significant barriers in accessing welfare schemes, formal employment, higher education, and political rights due to their ambiguous legal status. Quantitative patterns from KoboToolbox data, combined with qualitative narratives, reveal persistent challenges in documentation renewal, livelihood insecurity, and constrained future aspirations. The findings contribute to wider debates on statelessness, postcolonial citizenship and post-war Sri Lankan Tamil displacement by highlighting how administrative exclusion shapes everyday life. The study emphasises the need for rights-based policy reforms that address structural vulnerabilities rather than temporary relief-based mechanisms.
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    From securitisation of migration to aid securitisation? V4 donors and addressing the root causes of migration
    (Taylor & Francis, 2026-07-14) Szynol-Orlińska, Monika
    The 2014–2016 refugee and migrant crisis led to a hardening of stances and consolidation of resistance to migration in the Visegrad Group (V4) countries. Portraying migration as an existential threat to states’ and societies’ security, they took a relentless stance: no migrants from the Middle East and Africa on their territory. At the same time, the V4 countries did not oppose the need for crisis resolution. They supported tackling the root causes of migration, primarily by providing on-the-spot assistance and increasing Official Development Assistance (ODA) transfers. This paper examines the implementation of the ‘root cause’ strategy by V4 donors in the leading countries of origin of asylum-seekers from 2014 to 2016 and in selected transit countries. The analysis tracks how narratives concerning migration have translated into ODA provision (its volume, structure, and delivery channels) and into the use of aid as an instrument serving donors’ interests. The research shows that the V4 response to the crisis was instrumental, limited and selective; despite numerous declarations, the strategy was only partially implemented. Donors were more devoted to externalising migration control and enhancing cooperation with non-EU states than supporting the socio-economic development of countries generating migration pressure.
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    Migration Governance in Central and Eastern European Cities Post-2015
    (Springer, 2026-08-19) Łukasiewicz, Karolina; Pachocka, Marta; Nowosielski, Michał
    This open-access book provides a thorough overview of migration trends and governance in Central and Eastern European (CEE) cities since 2015. For decades, CEE cities were primarily shaped by emigration. However, more than a decade of unprecedented change—from the 2015 European refugee reception crisis to the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which triggered the largest forced displacement in Europe since World War II—has transformed the region into one of Europe’s most dynamic new immigrant destinations. This volume offers the first comprehensive account of how nine diverse CEE cities across Poland, Czechia, Hungary, and Romania are navigating this new reality. Moving beyond traditional Western-centric models, the book explores the ‘local turn’ in migration studies through the experiences of capital cities such as Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest. It also examines rapidly diversifying second-tier cities like Kraków and Brno, as well as border and shrinking cities including Lublin, Oradea, Płock, and Łomża. Readers are introduced to the innovative CEE Local Migrant Governance Index (CEELMiG), a novel tool designed to measure and compare local policies across CEE cities—capturing integration strategies, coordination mechanisms, migrant participation, research on diversity, and the funding schemes of inclusive measures. From ‘mainstreaming by accident’ to the rise of grassroots solidarity, the book highlights how local administrators, activists, and residents are bridging service gaps and redefining urban citizenship in contexts marked by crisis and illiberal pressures. Migration Governance in CEE Cities Post-2015 is essential reading for scholars and students across disciplines, as well as for policymakers, urban planners, migration practitioners, and anyone interested in how cities respond to—and shape—evolving migration dynamics in Europe.
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    Broken Worlds, Broken Forms: Societal Disruption and Narrative Rupture in The English Patient and Green Grass, Running Water
    (2026-03-05) Bashir, Sumayya
    This essay argues that Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water treat historical violence not as a mere theme but as a structuring force, showing how each author's departure from linear chronology reflects the cultural position from which they write. Ondaatje, writing as a Sri Lankan immigrant, renders the devastation of total war through a narrative oscillating between past and present, mirroring the fractured relationship to time and identity that displacement produces. King, by contrast, structures his novel through recursion, interruption, and circular return, drawing on Indigenous conceptions of temporality in which past, present, and future coexist rather than proceed sequentially, resisting the colonial logic of linear progress. Reading these formal strategies together, the essay contends that narrative disruption in both novels functions as historiographic critique: structure itself enacts how historical violence reorganizes a people's experience of time, revealing that each novel's formal innovation is inseparable from its author's cultural and historical position.
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    Misreading Innocence: Desdemona and the Failure of Patriarchal Logic in Othello
    (2026-03-09) Arora, Kurangi
    This essay examines Shakespeare’s Othello through the tension between Desdemona’s apparent transgression and her actual innocence. Drawing on scholarship concerning early modern marriage, gender hierarchy, and patriarchal authority, it argues that Desdemona’s independence, choice of husband, public speech, and movement beyond domestic expectations are repeatedly interpreted by the men around her as signs of sexual immorality. Through the play’s language and dramatic structure, Shakespeare constructs Desdemona as a figure who is treated as “readable,” with her behaviour reduced to a series of supposedly legible or understandable signs of chastity or guilt. Othello’s attempts to interpret Desdemona through metaphors of writing and reading, as well as his reliance on the handkerchief as material evidence, demonstrate how patriarchal authority transforms suspicion into certainty. Yet the audience’s knowledge of Desdemona’s innocence exposes the ultimate failure of this interpretive system. Her direct pleas of innocence contrast with the increasingly elaborate and fragmented language through which Othello constructs her guilt, while the handkerchief’s manipulated meaning reveals the instability of supposedly objective evidence. Eventually, Desdemona’s innocence exposes what Lena Cowen Orlin identifies as the “predictive incapacity of patriarchalism”: a system that attempts to understand and control women through predetermined signs but cannot accurately account for their actual behaviour. Shakespeare therefore presents patriarchal authority as not only restrictive but internally unstable and tragically destructive.