Navigating Asylum, Resettlement, and Integration: Syrian Refugees in France Beyond the Suffering Slot

Abstract

Abstract This article addresses the way that humanitarian conditioning continues in the lives of refugees after receiving asylum in Europe while also highlighting the perspective of refugees as they experience official and informal processes of integration. The ways the rhetoric of suffering must be invoked at various times throughout the asylum process are well documented. Less attention, however, has been paid to how asylum recipients in Europe continue to navigate these structures. Drawing on over 20 months of ethnographic research in Paris, France, this article explores the way that these resettled Syrian refugees encounter the rhetoric of suffering and other asylum structures in their everyday lives as an ongoing form of humanitarian conditioning. Through a focus on capabilities and aspirations, this article ultimately reveals how resettled refugees navigate this humanitarian conditioning to carve out lives and create new trajectories of integration in the wake of asylum in France.