Supporting the inclusion of refugees: Policies, theories and actions

If refugees are unexpected and undesired arrivals, there is a risk that they will be regarded asgritin the smooth functioning of existing society, institutional arrangements and culture. Ofcourse, we are not talking of thegritof resilience and coping strategies of refugees (Credé,Tynan, and Harms2017), and we are not talking of thegritthat is increasingly identified asthe key ingredient missing in the over-protected members of different generations, such astheGeneration-Zfollowing theMillennials(Lukianoffand Haidt2018). When refugees areconsidered the‘surplus population’(Bauman2004) to be disciplined into the host society,the risk is that well-meaning inclusion can result in the reverse and what has been termed‘inclusive exclusion’(Dobson2004). So, we give with one hand the discourse of humanity,peace and inclusion and with the other hand, competitive individualism is expressed in prac-tice in schools and other institutions where refugees must compete for scarce resources andmore easily experience failure and exclusion. There is in such a case a disjuncture betweenthe language of inclusion, the policy, the rhetoric, the communication strategy (the so-calledcomms and the creation of the right narrative) and the practice, existential experience and short, medium and longer-term consequences of exclusion