The Refugee Crisis and Religion: Beyond Conceptual and Physical Boundaries

t is hard to think of a time in recent history when both ‘religion’ and ‘refugees’ have been such prominent and controversial categories in public politics and discourses around the world. A range of complex dynamics has led to both phenomena independently rising to the top of policy agendas, including, though not limited to, concerns of rising insecurity, in part tied to the perception of mass uncontrolled movement of people, and the global war on terror discourse that contributes to linking ‘terrorist’ and ‘Muslim’ in the public consciousness. From there, it has been only a short step for these words to become linked with ‘refugee’ as well. Categories of ‘religion’, ‘conflict’ and ‘violence’ have already been tied to one another in social imaginaries in Euro-American contexts for some time (Cavanaugh 2009). In the context of the mass migration of displaced people driven by intractable civil war in Syria, the rise of ISIS, alongside existing refugee producing ‘hotspots’, such as Eritrea and Afghanistan (UNHCR 2015), ‘religion’, ‘conflict/violence/terror’ and ‘refugees’ is also becoming increasingly entangled in media, policy narratives and public discourses across numerous contexts.