Alice Szczepanikova

The European Commission Joint Research Centre's (JRC) Scenario Exploration System (SES) is a foresight gaming system developed to facilitate the application of futures thinking to policy-making. It was originally geared at engaging EU policy-makers with scenarios in a facilitated process with a low learning curve. Specifically, the SES was designed...

The article analyzes Chechen women's everyday experiences of war and violence and outlines their multiple effects on women's roles and identities. Particular attention is paid to how these effects are shaped by generational differences. The study is based on 35 oral history interviews with Chechen women in Austria, Germany, and Poland. The experien...

The presentation focuses on two intertwined factors that shape immigrant incorporation in today’s Europe: religion and gender. It draws on an empirical study of young refugee women from Chechnya (Russian Federation) residing in Germany, Austria, Poland and Belgium. It aims to explain the relationship between women’s religious identities and gender...

Up until the early 1990s today's Czech and Slovak Republics were countries of emigration rather than immigration. The 19th and the early 20th centuries witnessed large-scale emigrations from Czech and Slovak lands – then still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire – due to primarily economic deprivation but also religious and political persecution. T...

The article analyses the process of transformation and reinvention of patriarchal gender order at times of radical changes caused by violent conflict and life in emigration. The case study draws a comparison between younger and older generations of Chechen women in Austria, Poland and Germany and their radically different gender practices. The anal...

Accommodation centres are much more than means of securing asylum seekers’ housing needs. They are an embodiment of asylum and immigration policies. To understand these policies and their effects on asylum seekers, we need to ask what interests different institutional actors have in keeping asylum seekers in the centres. Based on the study of accom...

The international law defines who are refugees, their rights and the legal obligations of states that receive them. However, the actual formulation and implementation of asylum law are based on politically and historically contingent construction of 'a refugee' determined largely by the nation state. This article analyses the legal-political constr...

This article pursues critical gender analysis of conditions of non-governmental (NGO) assistance in the Czech Republic. The study scrutinises practices of assistance in local, low-threshold NGOs working with immigrants, asylum seekers and/or recognised refugees. Although they provide refugees with essential support, this research shows that the NGO...

The article examines the gender micropolitics of non-governmental assistance to refugees in the Czech Republic – a post-socialist society which is becoming a country of immigration. It critically examines relations of power between refugees and local nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). These NGOs act as mediators between refugees and the state, m...

This chapter examines how Chechen refugees in Europe come to terms with displacement by using a gender perspective. I analyse their settlement experiences through the notion of (re)construction which indicates that refugees’ settlement in a host country involves reconstruction of the past conceptions of family and home as well as construction of ne...

Jusqu'à la fin des années quatre-vingt, la Tchécoslovaquie produisait des réfugiés ; par sa proximité avec l'Allemagne et l'Autriche, les migrants la considéraient comme un pays de transit vers l'Europe de l'Ouest. La République tchèque accueille aujourd'hui des réfugiés des anciennes Républiques de l'ex-URSS. Les différentes institutions ne constr...

This article aims to critically discuss selected approaches to conceptualizing the institutions of a refugee camp in the academic literature with particular focus on the works of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. It is empirically grounded in the analysis of the situation of Chechen asylum seekers living in a refugee camp in the Czech Republic (...

This article aims to give an account of how refugees' family relations are constructed in exile. It is based on fieldwork conducted among Chechen asylum seekers living in a refugee camp in the Czech Republic in April 2004. It argues that although traditional norms defining women's and men's position in Chechen families have often been transgressed...

I]t is this floating world without the gravities of history and politics that can ultimately become a deeply dehumanizing environment for refugees, even as it shelters (Malkki, 1995, p. 518). Malkki (2002) criticizes the tendency to use the categories of "the refugee" and "the refugee camp" as ideal-typical figures which exist in a social void. She...

This study is an exploration of an institutionalised world that refugees inhabit in today’s Europe. It argues that the institutional system that organises the reception of refugees and their settlement in a receiving country is based on historically and politically contingent constructions of “a refugee”. The research was conducted in the Czech Rep...

Název a podnázvy z obálky