The paper examines, in a comparative way, the situation of refugees settled in Italy and the Netherlands. It examines how refugees themselves perceive their social condition in the two contrasting `models' of integration in Italy and the Netherlands and how they define integration success and develop strategies to achieve their goals. The narratives of refugees explored in this paper documents that integration, as it is perceived and desired by the refugees themselves, is both about its functional aspects and about social participation in the wider community. These aspects of integration consist of sets of overlapping processes that take place differently in various spheres of the receiving society and have various outcomes. It is argued that policy should recognize this complexity and acknowledge refugees as social actors rather than turning them into policy objects in order to facilitate integration in each of these sub-sectors.

This article examines the question of an absence of an integration policy, and specifically how this lack of state intervention is perceived by refugees themselves, and how it shapes their attitudes towards and strategies for integration. The emphasis in examining integration of refugees in this paper is on the importance of human agency in the process of structuring and re-structuring social relations across space and time. The article is based upon research among a group of refugees from former Yugoslavia settled in Rome. Their experiences presented in this paper document a case of integration in which the refugees, for the most part, have not encountered any kind of assistance programme. This situation caused considerable difficulty in the process of their settlement, particularly during its early stages, yet it permitted spontaneous and personalized encounters between the refugees' native culture(s) and that of the receiving society. It is suggested that the nature of these encounters contributed to strengthening the adaptability of the refugees. It also affected their subjective wellbeing and tended to compensate for the numerous problems associated with other aspects of their integration.

The paper takes the recent conflict and wars in the region of post-Yugoslav states and their impact on women as the point of departure. In this empirical context, I explore the patterns of violence against women, arguing that ethnic nationalism as a social phenomenon engenders a kind of "structural violence" with gender specific implications.Women are exposed to various forms of sexual, physical, and non-physical violence in their relation to ethnic-national movements and their respective states-in-the-making.Therefore the paper examines the ways in which gendered militarization of ethnic nationalism is used to justify different forms of abuse of women, from abuse of women's reproductive rights to domestic violence. Furthermore, it addresses the issue of political exploitation of militarized violence against women, wherein abused women are used by their nation-states to gain more power in the struggle for nationalistic expansion.KEYWORDS: women, violence, victimization, ethnic-conflict, nation-state. 2Public attention regarding women and war in some post-Yugoslav countries has been almost exclusively concerned with mass rape in the conflict, thus contributing to an equation of violence against women with a single form of abuse, while all other and equally intolerable forms of violence remain hidden. Rape is indeed one of the most brutal violations of women's rights and freedoms. In the context of war, rape becomes a symbol of the clash between power and powerlessness based on rather fixed traditional notions of masculinity and femininity.Furthermore, when rape is systematic and massive, and affects predominately women from a particular ethnic-national group, as is the case in the wars in the post-Yugoslav region, it becomes a tool of genocide. Yet violence against women in a context of ethnic-national conflicts has many patterns, some being subtle and veiled, thus hardly recognizable. Consequently, many forms of violence to which women are exposed remain unidentified, both among society at large and women themselves. This paper addresses the above issues through an exploration of the patterns of violence against women in the context of recent violent ethnic-national struggles and wars in the postYugoslav region. I argue that ethnic-nationalism as a social phenomenon engenders a kind of "structural violence" with gender specific implications.1 Consequently, women are exposed to different forms of sexual and non-sexual violence in their relation to ethnic-national movements and their respective states-in-the-making. In this respect, the paper examines the ways in which gendered militarization of ethnic-nationalism is used to justify different forms of abuse of women, i.e., from abuse of women's reproductive rights to domestic violence. Further, the paper addresses the issue of political exploitation of militarized violence against women, wherein abused women are used by their nation-states to gain more power for nationalistic expansion.Exploration of violent ethnic-national struggles and their impact on wo...

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