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Afghans have consistently been one of the largest groups of refugees arriving in Europe, with more than 600,000 Afghan asylum applications in European countries over the past ten years, second only in number to Syrians. Afghan migration to Europe is a response to both the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan and protracted displacement in countries hosting the vast majority of Afghan refugees, including Iran, where there is a well‐documented lack of protection, rights, and opportunities. Drawing on interviews undertaken in Turkey and Greece during the last three months of 2015, this article examines the experiences of Afghans who travelled to Europe from Iran, where they had been living for many years, and in some cases had been born. Their experiences, particularly when seen in the context of Afghan mobility historically, complicate dichotomies between “forced” and “voluntary” migration, and “origin” and “destination” countries, which underpin the Common European Asylum System. It is clear that mobility forms an important survival strategy for Afghans and others living in situations of protracted displacement, for whom efforts to provide durable solutions have been largely unsuccessful. Harnessing this mobility by facilitating and supporting—rather than preventing—onward migration is the key to unlocking protracted displacement.

 As European countries bordering the Mediterranean have introduced increasingly harsh measures to stem the flow of irregular migration across their frontiers, Turkey has become one of the main crossroads for flows of migration from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East into Europe.At the same time, as part of Turkey’s accession process, the European Union has stepped up pressure on Turkey to prevent the movement of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees into Europe.As a result of Turkey’s efforts to limit irregular migration flows, thousands of foreign nation­als without travel documents, refugees among them, are detained while attempting to either enter or exit the coun­try illegally.They are primarily held in detention centres, which are officially referred to as “foreigners’ guesthouses.” Turkey’s Ministry of Interior (MOI) severely limits access to detainees in these facilities by international and domestic NGOs and advocates.Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Turkey (HCA), a leading human rights NGO based in Istanbul, has provided legal aid to refugees since 2004 through its Refugee Advocacy and Support Program.Based on inter­views conducted by HCA with forty refugees from seventeen countries, this report examines refugees’ access to proced­ural rights in detention, as well as conditions in “foreigners’ guesthouses.” It identifies gaps between reported practice and standards of treatment set forth in Turkish legislation and international guidelines on detention.

View related articles View Crossmark dataAnthropology & Medicine Yoga bodies, yoga minds: contextualising the health discourses and practices of modern postural yoga This special issue of Anthropology and Medicine explores yoga's recent, rapid, global expansion as a health and wellness practice. The global yoga industry is currently estimated to be worth 88 billion dollars annually, and to have some 300 million practitioners, mainly in India, but also in the United States and Europe where yoga consumption and revenue has roughly doubled in the past eight years (Zuckerman 2020). Today, yoga's myriad forms offer practitioners a combination of postural work, breathing, and meditative techniques with the overall aim of improving health, strength, fitness, and a sense of wellbeing. Drawing on research in in India, Europe, North America, Canada, Japan, and online spaces, this special issue examines some of the contexts and localities where yoga is practiced, exploring who takes it up, what motivates them to do so, and how yoga is understood to influence health and wellbeing.The contributors to this special issue are scholars who participated in our panel on Yoga Bodies at the Association of Social Anthropologists' Conference on Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination: Re-creating Anthropology held at the University of Oxford in September 2018. The panel was concerned with exploring the diverse ways in which the biological, social and material converge in the creation of 'yoga bodies' . While aspects of the body provided the starting point for each presentation, ideas about health, wellbeing or living a 'good life' emerged as a central thread across almost all of the papers. We therefore decided to develop the theme of health and wellbeing for this special issue.In this Introduction, we start by giving some historical background to understanding yoga's current global popularity as a practice for health and wellbeing. Without attempting a comprehensive review, we select from the modern yoga scholarship aspects of this history that may be unfamiliar to non-specialist readers and may counter some current stereotypes: that yoga is an ancient Hindu or pre-Hindu practice with a linear unchanging history; that yoga is an essentially feminine practice of gentle stretching and relaxation; and that yoga is the product of the Californian counterculture of the 1960s. That there is some truth in these stereotypes may help explain yoga's current myriad forms and some of the tensions between them. However, the recent scholarship complicates these views and establishes that yoga has a multilinear and transnational history (Alter 2004;Singleton 2010;Newcombe 2019). It shows that modern postural yoga emerged as a contemporary practice for health and wellbeing only within the 'just-past of the present' , as Joseph Alter puts it -that is, over the past approximately 100-150 years -through the interactive effects of the international physical culture movement, Hindu nationalism, gender, naturopathy, and science (2004, xvi). Below we indicat...

Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) officers use the National Risk Assessment for Detention (NRAD) process to evaluate the "riskiness" of immigration detainees. The NRAD's key tool is a 2-page document laying out "risk factors" with corresponding points that add up to scores of "dangerousness" allegedly posed by non-citizens. CBSA officers then recommend detention in either a provincial prison or a lower security "immigration holding centre". In a national context of no legislated upper time limits on detention periods, and where telephonic and other access to incarceration sites is impeded, the NRAD form's outcome portends serious, long-term consequences.Drawing on an intersectional lens informed by constructivist approaches to risk, we argue that a "hybrid knowledge of risk" about immigration, racialization, and crime animates the NRAD process. After introducing the NRAD into scholarship, we historically situate the process in a longer arc of penalization contingent upon a 1994 shooting in Toronto that fomented a sociolegal association of racialized men with criminality. Personal stories of detainees in Ontario tie together our threads of social, legal, and policy analysis. Our analysis finds that the NRAD process normalizes incarceration for certain non-citizens in Canada, and both reflects and reinforces negative, racialized assumptions about riskiness.