Paper short abstract:

How do refugees who were granted protection in Norway and Switzerland employ notions like “safety” or “healing” to conceptualize a new and meaningful life? Drawing on ethnographic narratives, this paper explores emic strategies and tactics of remaking amidst constraints of the asylum regime.

Paper long abstract:

Our paper explores how refugees who were granted long-term legal protection conceptualize a new and meaningful life through notions like “safety” or “healing”. New beginnings are conditional on peoples’ recovery from experiences of various forms of violence. They can be informed by different meanings and practices of safety and healing.

Asylum creates a foundation upon which refugees’ desires and hopes for a new life can take shape. Contemporary national and global trends in refugee governance, however, are far from revolving around protection and recovery alone. Welfare states across Europe tie asylum to manifold requirements, often framed as integration. These requirements tend to have ambiguous and constraining effects on individuals’ everyday lives and their hopes and prospects for a new beginning. While social bonds and often traumatic memories continue shaping their lives after arrival, many refugees feel moral obligations to gratefully contribute to the host society’s good fortune. Acknowledging such entanglements of past and present experiences and (trans)national asylum politics, we shed new conceptual and empirical light on meanings, experiences and conditions of remaking lives (Das & Kleinman 2001).

We draw on ethnographic narratives on refugee settlement in Norway and Switzerland to explore emic conceptions of healing and safety which inform strategies and tactics of remaking (De Certeau 1988). In this way, we transcend the suffering subject in a dual sense: empirically by focusing on persons who were granted protection and, theoretically, by placing meanings and practices of healing and safety amidst given constraints at the centre of our analyses.