Asylum Seeker and Refugee Crisis as a Humanitarian Tragedy in the Contemporary World

Year 2018, Volume: 7 Issue: 2, 279 - 317, 31.12.2018

Rıdvan Şimşek , Mehmet Anık

https://doi.org/10.33722/afes.480997

Abstract

In the contemporary world, the increase in the number of people, who
have become asylum seekers and refugees involves many humanitarian tragedies.
The escape from a life in the shade of oppression and violence with the only
hope of having a better life may sometimes result in a fatal end. Even though
one of the target destinations of this type of migration is the Western
countries, asylum seekers and refugees are seen as persona non grata in these
countries. In this respect, the asylum seeker and refugee crisis, which
constitutes the general scope of this paper, will be discussed and analyzed
from a humanitarian perspective by considering the reactions of the Western
countries to this problem. Today, this problem causes many political debates
and crises in the Western countries. The rise of extreme right in the Western
world is one of the biggest obstacles to adopt a humanitarian approach to this
problem. At this point, the main argument of this paper is that the reactions
towards the asylum seekers and refugees in the Western countries have a
neo-racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic tendency, and that the current
socio-political conjuncture seriously threatens the hopes of those people with different
cultural, religious, linguistic or ethnic origin, who seek a peaceful
coexistence in the world.

Keywords

Refugee Crisis, Asylum Seeker Crisis, Refugee Migration, Asylum, International Migration

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