Gregg Bucken-Knapp - Institutions and Organizations of Refugee Integration: Bosnian-Herzegovinian and Syrian Refugees in Sweden

Over the past decade, the concept of diversity has gained a leading place in academic thought, business practice, politics and public policy across the world. However, local conditions and meanings of diversity are highly dissimilar and changing. For these reasons, deeper and more comparative understandings of pertinent concepts, processes and phenomena are in great demand. This series will examine multiple forms and configurations of diversity, how these have been conceived, imagined, and represented, how they have been or could be regulated or governed, how different processes of inter-ethnic or inter-religious encounter unfold, how conflicts arise and how political solutions are negotiated and practiced, and what truly convivial societies might actually look like. By comparatively examining a range of conditions, processes and cases revealing the contemporary meanings and dynamics of diversity, this series will be a key resource for students and professional social scientists. It will represent a landmark within a field that has become, and will continue to be, one of the foremost topics of global concern throughout the twenty-first century. Reflecting this multi-disciplinary field, the series will include works from Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, Law, Geography and Religious Studies. While drawing on an international field of scholarship, the series will include works by current and former staff members, by visiting fellows and from events of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Relevant manuscripts submitted from outside the Max Planck Institute network will also be considered.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15009

Cover image (c) Melisa Hasan

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First and foremost, the authors wish to thank all the respondents who took the time to share their stories with us for this project. Without their willingness to lend their voices to our research, there would clearly have been no book. And more importantly, there would not have been the opportunity for others to learn about the crucial insights into the integration process that refugees to Sweden can contribute.

We also wish to thank Zainab Fakih and Kristin Franke Bjrkman for conducting and transcribing interviews for the chapter on Syrian refugees, FORTE (Swedish Research Council for Health, Working, Life and Welfare) for their financing to the programs The Challenges of Polarization on Swedish Labour Market and Organising Labour Market Integration of Immigrants, which provided Vedran Omanovi with the necessary time to conduct this research. Students in the University of Gothenburg School of Public Administration MA course Managing Migration from Entry to Integration also deserve thanks. Seminars and discussions with them provided much of the inspiration for chapter three, The Voices of Refugees as a Method. We also thank colleagues at the Department of Business Administration and the Department of Sociology, University of Gothenburg, for their comments and suggestions at the seminars where draft portions of the book were presented and discussed.