Refugees and Asylum Seekers’ Emotions in Migration Studies

Abstract

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical studies on emotions in migration studies to determine the state of the art as well as to identify gaps. In addition to the three main approaches to understanding forced migrants’ emotional lives (extraordinary, everyday encounters, and therapeutic), this paper identifies different types of empirical research informed by these theoretical perspectives. They focus on; the impact of the context of migration, emotions during a specific stage of the journey, and the emotions, values, and traditions that forced migrants bring with them to the destination country. This literature review led to determining the most relevant tendencies and considerations. Due to the dominance of the therapeutic and extraordinary approaches, there is a need to (1) explore further the role of emotions in forced migration; (2) look at how forced migrants construct their emotions without losing the context (where, why and when); (3) investigate other functions of emotions or to ask how forced migrants make sense of their experience of violence, torture…etc.; (4) take into consideration the whole journey from beginning to end; (5) develop a theory based on empirical data which explains the interaction between emotions and belonging.