Global individual responsibility in refugee integration: conference report published

As an outcome of the international symposium “Global Individual Responsibility: The Role of the Citizen in Refugee Integration“, held at the Munich Center for Ethics at the University of Munich (Germany) from 25 to 27 April 2018, a new report presents recommendations to individuals and policy makers, with an aim to support and improve conditions for individual action and initiatives from civil society with respect to refugee integration.

With the number of displaced persons worldwide continuing to rise, the integration of newcomers to host societies has become a major global challenge. The international symposium aimed to expand on an understanding of the role of individual citizens in refugee integration, and reach new scholarly insights. Altogether 14 international speakers – scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, as well as practitioners and activists – discussed concepts of global individual responsibility and shed light on individual action and integration practices in high-income Western countries.

The symposium was organized and convened by members of the Global Young Academy’s Global Migration and Human Rights working group and was generously funded by the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation, with additional support from the Global Young Academy, the University of Melbourne (Australia) and Saint Mary’s University (Canada).

Recommendations for policy makers in the report were enriched by the input resulting from a break-out workshop in the context of an Evidence and Policy Summer School, co-organised by the GYA Science Advice working group, together with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), and the International Network for Government Science Advice (INGSA) in Laxenburg, Austria, in September 2018. The summer school’s theme was “The role of population and migration for sustainable development in the European neighbourhood”.

Conference Report here: LINK

A scholarly publication titled Responsibility for Refugee and Migrant Integration will be available in April 2019.