Supporting the inclusion of refugees: policies, theories and actions

If refugees are unexpected and undesired arrivals, there is a risk that they will be regarded as grit in the smooth functioning of existing society, institutional arrangements and culture. Of course, we are not talking of the grit of resilience and coping strategies of refugees (Credé, Tynan, and Harms 2017), and we are not talking of the grit that is increasingly identified as the key ingredient missing in the over-protected members of different generations, such as the Generation-Z following the Millennials (Lukianoff and Haidt 2018). When refugees are considered the ‘surplus population’ (Bauman 2004) to be disciplined into the host society, the risk is that well-meaning inclusion can result in the reverse and what has been termed ‘inclusive exclusion’ (Dobson 2004). So, we give with one hand the discourse of humanity, peace and inclusion and with the other hand, competitive individualism is expressed in practice in schools and other institutions where refugees must compete for scarce resources and more easily experience failure and exclusion. There is in such a case a disjuncture between the language of inclusion, the policy, the rhetoric, the communication strategy (the so-called comms and the creation of the right narrative) and the practice, existential experience and short, medium and longer-term consequences of exclusion.