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Contribution short abstract:

This paper seeks to investigate the intersections of human mobility, migration, refugee integration, and agency, with a focus on comparing the divergent concepts of “integration,” inclusion, and exclusion through a decolonizing perspective.

Contribution long abstract:

The main objective of this paper is to explore and decolonize the concept of “integration”, and analyze it in relation to how it is being understood and practiced within the countries of the Global South where the majority of the world’s migrants and refugees reside, and where they develop their own impromptu integration paradigms in increasingly protracted displacement situations in transit countries; which to a great extent resulting from the borders securitization and heavily restricted migration policies imposed by Europe, most notably in the aftermath of the Khartoum Process. Despite the absence of local integration policies in many of the countries of the Global South, migrants and refugees find themselves in situations in which they must develop their own strategies and navigate ways for a de facto self-integration. These integration models, despite their significance to the survival of overwhelming numbers of migrants and refugees, are typically informal and unrecognized in both scholarly and policy debates. The findings of the paper are based on field research undertaken under an ongoing research project led by the author; and focusing on tracing migrants’ cultural heritage and their collective memories of motilities, violence and struggle and their networks of solidarity in urban neighborhoods of Egypt.