Asylum seekers in the global context of xenophobia: Introduction to the special issue

In 2015 the global media fixated on the ‘Syrian crisis’ that became the ‘refugee crisis’ for Europe. This construction of crisis was Eurocentric, temporally narrow and presented as problem for European nation states. We view the ‘problem’ rather as the nationalism and racism of receiving countries with a resurgence of a discourse of ethno-nationalist European identity sharpened by the global financial crisis and neoliberal austerity. Despite...