Remembering the Past and Constructing the Future over a Communal Plate

From Center to Periphery and Back Again: A Systematic Literature Review of Refugee Entrepreneurship

“…'Peripheral-peripheral' characterizes our third group, denoting publications by authors who have peripheral affiliations and have used peripheral publication outlets. These account for 15 of our sources (22%), and encompass works by (chronologically listed): Singh [86]; Halkias et al ( [98], one of the six authors holds peripheral affiliation); Ayadurai [74]; Sabar and Posner [75]; Călin-Ştefan [76]; Morais [77]; Omeje and Mwangi [78]; Pulla and Kharel ( [79], one of the two authors holds peripheral affiliation); De Jager [80]; Raijman and Barak-Bianco [81]; Abdel Jabbar and Ibrahim Zaza [82]; Kachkar, Mohammed, Saad and Kayadibi [83]; Crush, Tawodzera, McCordic and Ramachandran ( [108], two of the five authors hold peripheral affiliations); Kachkar [84]; as well as Lankov, Ward, Yoo and Kim [85]. Three of these can also be counted in the first pattern -central affiliation, peripheral outlet ( [79,98,108]) with professional associations in India, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Korea, the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, Malaysia, Romania, and South Africa.…”

“…The vast majority have been published within the last decade, targeting audiences in business-related fields as well sociology and the social sciences, rather evenly. Despite their rich contributions as to the entrepreneurial processes of refugees who have migrated, especially across developing COOs and CORs (e.g., Africans across Africa, Syrians across the Middle-East, and South-East Asians to other parts of South-East Asia), worldwide citations are very poor as are cross-citations (though Sabar and Posner's [75] work is cited by Raijman and Barak-Bianco [81]), in part due to their recent publication emergence. This particular body of studies, along with the next grouping, demonstrates an important breadth of production from the periphery that examines significant, and the largest, factions of refugee populations.…”

“…Meanwhile, the majority of studies investigating refugee entrepreneurships in developing CORs (see Table 4 for wave 3) have made use of theories that center upon economic development, institutional theories, camp economies, and livelihood approaches (e.g., [83,101,103,107,108,110,111,121]). There have also been a number of studies that have applied micro-level theories, such as those dealing with personal traits, motivation theories, and identity theories (e.g., [72,75,77,94,96,113,125]), while some have presented a more philosophic and theoretical consideration dealing with the phenomenon of "being", perceiving it through, for example, the ontology of belonging (e.g., [118]), the meaning of citizenship (e.g., [117]), resilience humanitarianism (e.g., [124]), and neoliberal theory [110].…”

“…For the individual, refugee entrepreneurship is seen as a self-organizing form of generating income and as an effective livelihood strategy [12,33,71,74,100,[103][104][105]107,111,112,115,119], also providing meaning and sense-making [75,106,117,122], and patterns through which to cope with and reconcile life journeys [79]. In addition, a number of studies highlight entrepreneurship as instrumental towards the integration processes of refugees [25,67,68,76,89,94,96,126,137].…”

“…At the meso-or community-level, refugee entrepreneurship is viewed as enhancing local services and developing local refugee communities [12,26,63,70,78,79,100,127]. Since refugee businesses serve as community centers and information points, they can contribute to the formation and strengthening of social capital which then leads to the construction and reconstruction of community identity [26,33,71,75,93,104,108,109,113,119].…”