Refugees, settlement processes and citizenship making: an Australian case study

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to the modest stock of empirical research on citizenship by exploring how refugees in Australia approach citizenship through the prism of their experiences of arrival and settlement. Their narratives support research elsewhere which argues that citizenship remains crucial to refugees' claims to a full set of human rights. They also demonstrate that territorialised citizenship, closely tied to national identity, no longer captures the various ways in which refugees position themselves as citizens in the world. Rather, a kind of ‘global citizenship’ emerges as a model of postcolonial citizenship, that is underpinned by contemporary re-inscriptions of the ‘West and the rest’.