Suchergebnisse

In the summer of 2015, the UN reported that there were more than 60 million refugees worldwide, making the current refugee crisis the largest in history. Though the refugee crisis is global, it has a particular regional and local geography that demands attention. As readers ofIJMESundoubtedly know, this crisis has disproportionally affected people in the Middle East. Since the end of World War II, a majority of the world's refugees have originated from this region. Five years of war in Syria is the most recent cause of displacement, but the American-led Iraq War in 2003 and the displacement of Palestinians with the establishment of Israel in 1948 have produced tens of millions of refugees.

Amidst a rise in hate crimes, hate group organizing, and anti-Muslim and anti-refugee policy making in the United States, this paper examines efforts by a national hate group to organize opposition to the resettlement of Syrian Muslim refugees in West Virginia, a non-traditional refugee destination. Through analysis of materials disseminated at a public seminar titled the "Invasion and Colonization of West Virginia," we identify four unique social-spatial themes this group is using to make alarmist and conspiratorial claims about Muslim refugees invading and colonizing the state and nation. These themes include the language of smallness, which affixes a white and Christian identity to certain spaces and suggests that these spaces are threatened. Spatial themes of 'fresh territory' and 'sowing seeds' are used to frame refugee resettlement as an assertion of social-spatial control to change 'small spaces' and ultimately change America. Claims of invasion and colonization function powerfully through the fourth theme of the "Other Islamic Bomb," which frames Muslim women's fertility as the vehicle of the invasion and colonization. This paper adds to emerging literature on the geographies of Islamophobia by examining not only the convergence of anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiment but its mobilization in regionally and locally specific contexts. The analysis demonstrates the dynamic interplay between spatial and social claims on which these alarmist narratives rely to vilify Muslims and refugees and to foment opposition in places not historically associated with immigration or refugee resettlement.

Scaling Identities combines theoretical analysis with a rich set of case studies to help readers understand how national identity is negotiated across spatial scales. As nationalism and identity have continued as critical global flashpoints, this book provides the only up-to-date, comprehensive treatment of the territorial and scalar dimensions of national identity.