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This paper sets out to provide an analysis of refugee integration policies in Sweden and Norway, by means of comparative analysis. There is a particular focus on the ideological foundations of the Swedish and Norwegian refugee integration policies, and the main programmes drawn on by the countries' authorities in order to integrate refugees. Further, the focus is widened to identify and analyse the changes, disparities and ambiguities in the Swedish and Norwegian refugee integration policies. The paper also seeks to examine how their experience can help in understanding the limitations of extensive state assisted integration measures. It is maintained here that these Scandinavian countries have developed extensive state sponsored integration programmes of a magnitude which is unique in a European context and elsewhere, and that housing and employment assistance are the two major pillars in both Swedish and Norwegian refugee integration policies. The findings suggest that Sweden and Norway have undergone similar experiences in respect of the challenges and long term outcomes of refugee integration policy-making. Although based on the principle of a strong welfare state, which provides extensive resettlement and integration assistance to refugees, refugee integration policies in Sweden and Norway have not succeeded in equalizing the initial inequalities between refugees and the rest of the population.

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Since the war in Syria started in 2011, many children left their war-torn country, alone or together with their families, and fled to neighboring countries in the Middle East, to Turkey or to Europe. This article will compare how Syrian refugee children are included or not -in school systems both in Europe (Sweden, Germany and Greece) and outside Europe (Turkey and Lebanon). These five countries represent very different ways of receiving children in their educational system. We will compare national institutional arrangements like access to compulsory school, access after compulsory school age, welcome or immersion classes, second language education and tracking mechanisms. Including children as soon as possible in regular classes seems to provide the best chances for school success, whereas educating refugee children in a segregated parallel school system for extended periods often results in early school leaving or not attending school at all.

Multicultural urban schools in Sweden are facing two major challenges. First, the communities the schools serve are stigmatized and economically impoverished, leading to growing concerns regarding the quality of education, lack of credibility, and outflow of students. The second challenge is the ambivalent relationships with students' parents (presumable consumers and partners, but who are also regarded as culturally conservative) and with the broader community, such as public authorities and universities. I argue that we cannot understand the practical operations and outcomes of multicultural schools if we look only at the curriculum, individual attitudes, or educational policy changes and do not examine the broader challenges facing these institutions. What is needed is a more relational approach linking together the interests of different groups, policy changes, modes of representation, and the educators' practices.

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An exploration is presented of how urban spaces, polarized by class and ethnicity, structure the basic conditions of emerging local school markets. The authors investigate how the distribution of symbolic capital, or 'hot knowledge' of the market, affects schools, the market, and the urban spaces themselves. The study is guided by theoretical notions involving lived local school markets, competitive spaces and symbolic capital. Methodologically, the study is based on ethnographic fieldwork at three compulsory schools in Stockholm. Analytically, the ways in which relations among urban spaces and school choice, and actors' perceptions of these relations, affect the actors' subsequent positioning in the local market, are illustrated. The authors' main conclusion is that despite nationally defining principles mandating fairness, transparency and integration, school choice policy is being implemented on an uneven playing field, aggravating current patterns of segregation in education and even housing. Consequently, a call is made for an urgent reframing of some of the policy's nationally defining principles.

Given the institutional and financial opportunity to choose any school — public or private/independent — in the city, how are we to understand students choosing to stay in their low-performing, high-poverty schools with bad reputations? Drawing on interviews with 53 students from two urban schools in Stockholm and Malmö, as well as on the secondary literature and theoretical perspectives on community discourse and the freedom of choice policy, I argue that we will never understand why students choose to stay if we consider only the values of the pedagogical commodities exchanged in the educational quasi-market. The analytical gaze ought to embrace sociological perspectives on the local community and schools, including individual strategies in relation to school choice and the power of relations, categorization and stigmatization. Thus, I conclude that neither deficiency in information, transportation costs and time nor some murky cultural-religious incentives are behind the decision to stay. The major incentive can be found in the ongoing negotiations between different aspects of community and school discourse that young people develop, whereby, among other things, the prospect of losing a network and the feeling of safety and becoming an outsider in exchange for gaining access to a ‘Swedish’ middle-class school is, for the time being, not deemed a fair deal.