The Integration of Refugees into Croatian Society. Ethnographies of Exercising Rights

Abstract

Refugees who are beneficiaries of international protection in Croatia are granted rights, the implementation of which is discussed in this article, based on qualitative research methods conducted between February 2015 and September 2017. The article discusses how these granted rights are exercised by individuals-persons who have been granted asylum in Croatia. The research is based on an ethnography of the particular, involving participant observation and open and semi-structured interviews with refugees and representatives of institutions and organizations involved in integration. The main Croatian legislative act valid during the research period was partially implemented. Its implementation was the most problematic in an area that refugees consider as essential for integration: the provision of state-supported Croatian language courses. Other problematic areas for exercising rights were access to healthcare and to the education system. The article also compares the research findings with the results of migrants' and refugee studies completed in (mostly) Western European countries. Besides similarities with such studies, this research acknowledges the importance of a local context for integration and introduces a new, existential dimension of integration that proved to be crucial for the successful integration of refugees in Croatia.

Strengthening Borders, Managing Centres: Reception Conditions and Provisions of Services to Asylum Seekers in Croatia

“…However, given that the government officials and civil society representatives were commonly referring to Croatia as a transit country with low numbers of asylum seekers, it seems that the integration policies and longer-term solutions were less relevant and neglected, as most migrants usually desire to solely pass through Croatia. What can be determined from this situation is that the difficulties asylum seekers face when trying to integrate into society indirectly helps the government to maintain the image of Croatia as a transit country, whose initial reception standards are sufficient by the EU standards, but the quality of integration is a rather inefficient, as it was repeatedly concluded by previous studies (Baričević, 2013;Valenta, Zuparic-Iljic and Vidovic, 2015;Jurković, 2018).…”