Guest Editors:
Professor Manuela Stranges, PhD: Università della Calabria, Italy
Professor Elena Ambrosetti, PhD: Department MEMOTEF, Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy
Submission Status: Closed | Submission Deadline: 8 March 2024
GENUS is calling for submissions to our Collection on Refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants. Characteristics, trends, determinants, consequences.
According to the UN Refugee Agency, the number of forced migrants around the world, escaping from persecution, war and conflicts in their own countries, is increasing dramatically year by year, exceeding 65 million in 2016. Among these, 2,8 million were asylum seekers, 22,5 million were refugees and the remaining 40.3 were internally displaced persons. The Mediterranean Sea has always been one of most important gateways for migrants to enter Europe in the pursuit of better living conditions. Within the countries affected by these flows, Italy has always played a central role, especially because of its relative proximity to the coasts of North Africa. The recent asylum crisis has highlighted the inadequacies of European asylum policies: existing asylum system, which encourages migrants to make hazardous maritime or overland crossings to gain access to an uncertain prospect of obtaining refugee status, is inefficient, poorly targeted and lacks public support. Most often the movement of forced migrants occurs in an undocumented manner, using the same routes and means of transport of other types of migrants but for different reasons (e.g. economic migrants). Those flows are “mixed”, as the reason for migration is usually determined by a mixture of factors (family, asylum, economic conditions, and so forth). Exploring the trends and determinants of such flows and the consequences of this migration experience for individuals (micro level) and for countries (macro level) is becoming an emerging issue.