Integration
I want to write about refugee education, so I clumsily google “integration”. The browser, tailoring results to me as a German user, returns this definition: Einbeziehung, Eingliederung in ein größeres Ganzes [Inlcusion, incorporation into a bigger whole]. By default, my mind computes images of an ethno-nationalist society as the “bigger whole”.
Dissatisfied and a little disconcerted, I click through other dictionary entries. To my relief, Merriam Webster Dictionary (2025) adds an important detail to the above definition: “incorporation as equals into society or an organization of individuals of different groups” (emphasis added). Here, integration works to create egalitarian unity while respecting differences.
Let’s turn to the literature: in line with the Merriam definition, many scholars and think tanks emphasise equal rights for migrants (Huddleston & Vink, 2015; Murphy et al. 2019; The Migration Observatory, 2020; Bottero, 2023). Other readings of ‘integration’ scrutinise not the end result but the “process by which immigrants become accepted into society” (Penninx & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2016:14).
I’m interested in this acceptance process. If anything, Europe has an acceptance problem. Anti-migration campaigns and xenophobia are all over the continent; nationalist border-control narratives win votes while any mention of migrant aid will be punished with loss of political power. Politically, standing up for European values no longer seems incentivising. Bulley (2017) points out that Europe’s display of its fundamental values has resulted in inner-European backlash against these same values, threatening Europe’s image as a community bound by values of democracy, inclusion, and hospitality. How is Europe to respond to a growing majority wishing to see anti-democratic and discriminatory views politically represented?
Democracy is not simply the rule of the majority; it is about how the majority tolerates minorities. Edmund Burke (1793) wrote that “a democracy has many striking points of resemblance with a tyranny. […] in a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority”.
I won’t deep-dive into a discussion of the nature and pitfalls of democracy here. Rather, I seek to investigate how the increasingly anti-European and nationalist political climate influences refugee education policymaking. I deliberately focus on policymaking rather than policy in order to see whether negative public attitudes impede effective refugee education governance and policy implementation. In a next step, I present how the UN’s Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has used Sohail Inayatullah’s Casual Layered Analysis to 1) unpack the systems and myths that give rise to anti-migrant views and 2) propose transformative narratives that might cultivate positive attitudes towards refugees. Drawing on the UN’s analysis, zoom in on the potential of global citizenship to transform the self-understanding of host societies beyond host. The concept of global citizenship dissolves the “us-vs-them” binary and asks that human rights be granted to all regardless of country of birth or dwelling place. Finally, I reflect upon what it means to foster a global citizenship mindset.
Refugee education policymaking in a nationalist, anti-European climate
A review of the refugee education policyscape revealed that while an abundance of international frameworks and national programmes exists, there is no comparative monitoring mechanism for the implementation of refugee education policies. This gap seems like a missed opportunity for exchanging best practices, preventing duplication, and, most importantly, ensuring government accountability to provide quality education for refugee students. Even the OECD with its otherwise imposing international educational data regime only offers case study analyses on refugee education (OECD, 2019, 2022, 2023) but has not introduced refugee education as a category for international ranking. Principally, I am critical of education ranking regimes, given previous consequences such as the marketisation of education and the perpetuation of standardised assessment. Moreover, refugee education requires particular contextual sensitivity, which could become undermined by standardised indicators.
Yet, I suspect that Europe’s acceptance problem forms another reason for the absence of synchronised monitoring of refugee education across countries. If a ranking showed that a country was providing well for refugee students, that country’s government would be applauded on a European stage but may receive backlash from voters opposing migration. A good ranking would risk feeding populist resentment of the government caring more for “others” than for nationals.
In turn, a low ranking on the “effective refugee education scale” might not earn critique at domestic level but at European level. European bodies might call out governments for not meeting refugee education standards. It is this European-level critique, which may then backfire at home, as people from the far ends of the political spectrum like to find fault with the EU “telling us what to do”.
It seems that international refugee education monitoring would put governments into a lose-lose situation. Regardless of countries’ performance, their very engagement in refugee education renders them susceptible to attacks from within and without. The issue at heart: the populist imaginary of vertical negligence (not being represented by the ruling elite) on the one hand and of horizontal threats (e.g., migrants and refugees extinguishing national culture and taking resources away from nationals) on the other hand. With Europe in the grips of this imaginary, policymaking related to improving refugee education as a key integration process may become increasingly restricted.
Forgetting it’s about human rights
To restore civic support for refugee rights, there have been attempts to cultivate positive public perceptions of refugees. However, information campaigns commonly highlight refugees’ economic contributions to host countries (The Adecco Group, 2017; European Commission, 2023; Pakfar, 2025). Refugees are cast as the solution to Europe’s aging population and labour shortages. While providing refugees with meaningful employment opportunities is essential to enable them to be economically independent, campaigns highlighting the economic usefulness of refugees instrumentalise people and make us forget that refugees are entitled to employment, education, and social welfare by international law at least since the 1951 Refugee Convention (Article 17) as well as the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 14).
To make integration contingent on whether refugees are needed by host countries is to make human rights conditional and transactional. Still, communications looking to improve public attitudes towards migrants and refugees reproduce instrumentalising narratives. These well-intended campaigns fail to address the deeper issues.
Going deeper
Futures-studies scholar Sohail Inayatullah developed a method to prompt and guide exploration of deeper issues. Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) breaks complex phenomena down into four casual layers:
- Litany: visible, surface-level facts and data evidencing the issue;
- Systemic causes: social, economic, political, and cultural systems producing those facts;
- Worldview or discourse: ideologies and narratives that shape interpretations of the issue;
- Myth or metaphor: archetypical beliefs and symbols that perpetuate people’s sense of identity and perception of others and the world.
By exploring these layers, CLA helps reveal underlying causes and assumptions of perceived issues. CLA then opens up possibilities for transformative strategies to address perceived issues.
CLA has been employed across sectors. The UN Refugee Agency turned to CLA to unpack the topic in question, scrutinising deep-rooted narratives that produce negative public attitudes towards refugees. In the UNHCR’s visual analysis, the left column deconstructs current refugee-related issues as symptoms of underlying ideologies; the right column proposes narrative changes that might create positive attitudes towards refugees.
The UNHCR’s analysis offers various focal points for interventions geared towards favourable public perceptions of refugees; Global citizenship stands out to me, having made a link to global citizenship education in my previous blog on the dilemma of peace education: “peace […] requires an inclusive, democratic and participatory process in which […] all human rights and fundamental freedoms of all persons without exception are upheld and active global citizenship is promoted” (UNESCO, 2023).
Fostering a global citizenry
Global citizenship proposes a transnational worldview. Your civic responsibilities go beyond borders, and you might feel at home anywhere in the world. In this sense, global citizenship diffuses the concepts of host country and home country. Place of birth or ethnic origin no longer work to identify neither the stranger nor the host (Derrida, 2000). Liberating each from their origin-bound roles, the stranger and the host can meet at eyelevel in a shared place. In a global citizenry, integration does not depend on a generous host and a stranger working hard to earn their rights. Integration is the process of recognising our common humanity, entitling every person to human rights no matter their dwelling place.
Further research should investigate whether global citizenship attitudes would enable open and extensive government investment in refugee education and migrant support more broadly. I believe that civic advocacy for such investment could pave the way towards more coordinated sharing of best practices and international monitoring of policy implementation.
Remains only the question: how do we foster a global citizenship attitudes in the public, especially at this time?
Fostering a global citizenry will require meaningful encounters between global citizens. Becoming a global citizen is about more than rational understanding of what it means to be one; it is about experiencing the affective qualities of co-creating a global citizenry.
Exchanging stories (e.g., Portraits of Refugees, published by the Council of Europe), sharing learning spaces, making art together—why, despite the overwhelming evidence of the benefits of arts education for inclusion, belonging, empathy, self-esteem, and academic performance are (refugee) education policy frameworks still refraining from upholding or at least mentioning the arts??—may be ways to comprehend our responsibility for fellow global citizens less as an abstract duty but an intuitive compassion. This does not mean necessarily that we must go around interacting with different people all the time and participating in global citizenship workshops; Some poetry might do much without much:
“Kid in the Park” by Langston Hughes
Lonely little question mark
on a bench in the park:
See the people passing by?
See the airplanes in the sky?
See the birds
flying home
before
dark?
Home’s just around
the corner
there —
but not really
anywhere.
__
How to foster a global citizenry, or: why are we here if not for each other?
References
Bottero, M. (2023). Integration (of immigrants) in the European courts’ jurisprudence: supporting a pluralist and Rights-Based paradigm? Journal of International Migration and Integration / Revue De L Integration Et De La Migration Internationale, 24(4), 1719–1750. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-023-01027-7
Bulley, D. (Ed.) (2017). (Auto)immunising hospitality: Europe. In Migration, Ethics and Power: Spaces of Hospitality In International Politics. SAGE Publications Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526401755.n6
Burke, E. (1793). Reflections on the Revolution in France: And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event. London: James Dodsley. (Original work published 1790) pp. 186.
Derrida, J. (2000). HOSTIPITALITY. Angelaki, 5(3), 3–18. https://doi-org.eux.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/09697250020034706
European Commission. (2023, November 15). Commission proposes EU Talent Pool to help address labour shortages across Europe. European Commission – HOME Affairs. https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/commission-proposes-eu-talent-pool-help-address-labour-shortages-across-europe-2023-11-15_en
Huddleston, T., & Vink, M. P. (2015). Full membership or equal rights? The link between naturalisation and integration policies for immigrants in 29 European states. Comparative Migration Studies, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-015-0006-7
Inayatullah, S. (1998). “Causal Layered Analysis: Poststructuralism as Method.”
Futures, 30(8), 815–829. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-3287(98)00086-X
Merriam-Webster. (2025). Integration. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved October 15, 2025, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/integration
Murphy, C., et al. (2019). Building and Applying a Human Rights-Based Model for Migrant Integration Policy, Journal of Human Rights Practice, 11(3), 445–466, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huz032
OECD (2019). Refugee education: Integration models and practices in OECD countries. OECD Education Working Papers, No. 203, OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/a3251a00-en
OECD (2022). Holistic refugee and newcomer education in Europe : Mapping, upscaling and institutionalising promising practices from Germany, Greece and the Netherlands. OECD Education Working Papers, No. 264, OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/9ea58c54-en
OECD (2023). Recognition of Prior Learning for Ukrainian Refugee Students. OECD Policy Responses on the Impacts of the War in Ukraine. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/09936722-en
Pakfar, S. (2025, March 28). “We’re Better Together”: Private sector stepping up for refugee inclusion. UNHCR. https://www.unhcr.org/europe/news/announcements/we-re-better-together-private-sector-stepping-refugee-inclusion
Penninx, R. & Garcés-Mascareñas, B. (Eds.) (2016). The Concept of Integration as an Analytical Tool and as a Policy Concept. In Integration Processes and Policies in Europe. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21674-4_2
The Adecco Group. (2017). Labour market integration of refugees: Focus Europe – Executive summary. Adecco Group. https://www.adeccogroup.com/-/media/project/adecco-group/adeccogroup/press-releases/labour-market-integration-of-refugees-focus-europe-executive-summary.pdf
The Migration Observatory. (2020, March 24). Policy primer: Integration. The Migration Observatory. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/primers/policy-primer-integration/
UNESCO (2023). Recommendation on Education for Peace and Human Rights, International Understanding, Cooperation, Fundamental Freedoms, Global Citizenship and Sustainable Development. UNESCO. https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/recommendation-education-peace-and-human-rights-international-understanding-cooperation-fundamental?hub=87862
Zaidi (2022, March 7). New Frontiers: The Future Narratives of Refugee Crises. UNHCR Innovation – Project Unsung. https://medium.com/project-unsung/new-frontiers-the-future-narratives-of-refugee-crises-b8878e519f8c
