Active refugee admission policies in Europe: exploring an emerging research field

Resettlement and other active refugee admission policies are high on national, regional and international agendas. The UN Global Compacts put safe and orderly migration, access to protection as well as responsibility-sharing centre stage. The EU is negotiating a common framework for resettlement and humanitarian admission programmes. Several European countries are expanding existing programmes or introducing new ones. Traditional resettlement is only one of several active refugee admission policies (ARAPs), alongside, for instance, humanitarian admission, private sponsorship programmes, and scholarship programmes. Often subsumed under the term ‘resettlement’, ARAPs is a broader concept partly reshaping the political objectives, target groups and actor constellations of traditional resettlement. This begs a number of questions that cut across various disciplines and methodological approaches. Laying the basis for continuous engagement with this topic, we map some of these questions and suggest avenues for future research. This blog post introduces the concept of Active Refugee Admission Policies and aims to establish a working group of the same name within the German Network on Forced Migration Research.