Abstract:The concept of resilience continues to be popular within various discourses and disciplines across the social and natural sciences, and has also been adopted politically and in policy. The concept's extended and widening usage in ever-increasing contexts creates further complexities and contestation on what construes resilience. Generally, in these conceptualisations, resilience is a positive outcome following significant crisis and disaster at an extreme scale. However, such definitions and constructs ignore that resilience manifests itself in subtler and more mundane ways in people's daily life and daily activities. This article explores how resilience is built into everyday life and how faith is used as a tool of resilience by individuals from diverse communities in their daily experiences in the city of Birmingham. This article contributes to the resilience literature by exposing examples of resilience as narrated during our in-depth interviews with participants (comprised of members from various new and established migrant ethnic communities), with particular attention given to faith as a form of resilience. This article argues that resilience manifests itself in the day-to-day experiences and practices of individuals and that faith can play an important role in individuals' lives in overcoming and coping with the challenges of their daily stressors.

The Brexit referendum has led to uncertainty, which has threatened EU migrants' resources, including their rights to reside, to run a business or access welfare. Cross-national political and legal resources that include citizenship rights can enable migrants' access to health care, pensions, education and other welfare benefits, but these remain far from guaranteed. Using Conservation of Resources theory, we show how coping with uncertainty requires the mobilisation of individual and collective resources. We draw on 55 qualitative interviews to explore how three groups of EU migrants, entrepreneurs, Somali onward migrants and British retirees in Spain, respond to Brexit related uncertainty. We examine the ways migrants utilise individual and social resources to respond to such uncertainty and explore their local, national and transnational coping tactics. Our data builds on existing knowledge around the relationship between migration and uncertainty and enables the development of Conservation of Resources theory in relation to migration and transnationalism. We show how migrants draw upon wide-ranging transnational resources, which complement the local resources that are usually the focus of the theory. As such, we provide a useful mechanism to understand migration and uncertainty, which may have utility in considering other migration crises or stresses.

In recent years, the extreme right wing (XRW) has undergone significant and rapid change to the extent that it now presents a very real threat to the domestic security of the United Kingdom (UK). This has resulted in a number of challenges for various stateex, institutional and grassroots stakeholders including how to appropriately and effectively respond and counter this growing threat. Among these challenges are concerns as to whether existing counter-tremism policies and measures – to date having almost solely been applied in response to Islamist extremism – remain fit for purpose. This Working Paper draws on interdisciplinary research into governmental, institutional and community responses to Islamist extremism in the city of Birmingham to speak directly to these concerns. Informed and contextualised by our findings, we provide an overview of counter-extremism policy, consider the criticisms and concerns expressed about these, set out the evidence base for the growing threat posed by the XRW, before highlighting a number of challenges stakeholders will need to consider if they are to avoid the errors of the past and build on the lessons learned. As well as making a new and timely contribution, we hope this paper will stimulate and provoke further discussion about the changing nature of the UK’s domestic extremism threat and the policy measures in place.

Purpose This study aims to investigate the impact of the Brexit referendum on feelings of belonging and home among secondary migrant Somali families in the city of Birmingham. Here, the Brexit referendum is understood through the analytical framework of the politics of belonging in that it functioned as a political mechanism that demarcated who was able to belong and who was not. Design/methodology/approach This research was qualitatively designed, comprising 25 in-depth, semi-structured interviews that used a whole family methodological approach. In doing so, this paper considers how the referendum challenged notions of citizenship as well as community and individual identities. Findings For the families engaged, they experienced the referendum as a mechanism that immediately conveyed notions of “otherness” and “foreign-ness” onto them, thereby creating anxiety, uncertainty and instability. This paper argues that the emotional components of belonging were also challenged to the extent that feelings of security, safety and “home” became rendered meaningless through the disempowering impact of the referendum via the removal of autonomy and choice in the bonds that exist between people and places. Originality/value This paper generates new knowledge about the impact of the Brexit referendum. As “one-off” event, this research provides new insights into the political, social and cultural impacts of the vote. It considers a minority group that is seen to be hard to reach and thereby under-researched.