Home and Peaceful Integration: The Ambiguous Experience of Home for UK Asylum Seekers

This paper asks whether the potential for peaceful integration of asylum seekers (and ultimately refugees) to make a legitimate claim to a new home in the UK exists. Based on extensive interviews with both asylum seekers and community voices as well as vox pops with local citizens, we find the answer to this question to be ambiguous. The ambiguity resides in the meaning of ‘home’ as both a deeply personal and private residence and a civil-political one. We argue two things: first, that asylum seekers’ ambiguous experience of home is best captured by distinguishing between four phases: (i) the loss of home: reasons for having to escape; (ii) forced exit: the journey as a struggle for survival in search of a new home; (iii) denial of home upon arrival in the UK; and (iv) a taste of home: community engagement and communicative peacebuilding. Second, we argue that it is civil resistance at local level to state domopolitics that bears the potential for peaceful integration and reveals the fundamental link between home and peaceful integration for asylum seekers.