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Paper short abstract

Examines how Syrian refugee youth in Croatia navigate schooling, racism, and securitized borders. Using critical ethnography and collective memory writing, it foregrounds youth political agency, solidarity with Palestine, and refusal of racialized victimhood.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how refugee youth navigate schooling, belonging, and political subjectivity amid overlapping regimes of racialized violence, securitized migration, and colonial war. Grounded in decolonial theory, critical migration studies, critical youth studies, and transnational feminist pedagogies, the analysis understands borders not only as territorial technologies but as racialized, pedagogical, and affective regimes that shape everyday life.

Drawing on two-phase critical ethnographic research with Syrian refugee youth in Croatia, during the COVID-19 pandemic and public mobilizations against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the study traces how borders materialize within schooling through language exclusion, surveillance, and racialized disciplining. These practices are situated within Croatia’s active participation in the European border regime, including pushbacks, detention, and the normalization of racialized securitization, as well as the Croatian government's public alignment with Israeli state violence. Together, these dynamics intensify anti-Muslim racism and producing a moral economy in which Arab and Muslim lives are rendered conditionally grievable. Across both phases, schooling, migration governance, and geopolitical alignment emerge as mutually constitutive sites of racialization.

Rather than positioning refugee youth as passive victims of crisis, the paper foregrounds their ethical, accountable and political agency. Methodologically, it advances a decolonial, youth-centered research praxis grounded in collective narration, political consciousness, and intergenerational memory. The paper argues that research and programming with refugee youth must move beyond depoliticized notions of well-being and participation and instead engage young people as ethical subjects actively navigating, contesting, and reimagining life under conditions of colonial and racialized governance.