Project Title: FOCUS – Forced Displacement and Host Community Solidarity for Refugees 2019-2021 (3 Years)

Scholarship programme: Horizon 2020 (European Commission)

The inaugural meeting held in Copenhagen (Denmark) on January 16-17, 2019.

Project Description

The vision of FOCUS is to increase understanding and provide effective and evidence-based solutions to the challenges of forced migration within host societies and thus contribute to increasing tolerance, peaceful coexistence and reducing extremism across Europe and the Middle East. Based on extensive mapping and interdisciplinary field research, conducted in Jordan, Croatia, Germany and Sweden, FOCUS explores the social and psychological dimensions of refugee-host-community relations and analyzes the socio-economic integration of refugees and its consequences in host communities. The integration solutions will be pilot tested in at least five European countries by governmental and non-governmental end users. The solutions are finally collected in the Refugee and Host Community Toolkit, which will support policy makers, municipal authorities, civil society organizations and other stakeholders in responding to the needs of both refugees and host communities and thus act as agents of change in the field. In addition, FOCUS undertakes an ambitious program of engagement with policy makers, end users, host communities, refugees and other stakeholders. This will ensure that FOCUS research and solutions are acceptable and useful to policy makers, while ultimately meeting the needs of end-user organizations, refugees and host communities.

Coordinator: Danish Red Cross

Partners:  AND Consulting Group,SVEUCILISTE U ZAGREBU FILOZOFSKI FAKULTET, MALMO HOGSKOLA, HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITAET ZU BERLIN, 7 ARTTIC, Q4 PR LIMITED

Main objectives:

Ø Increase our understanding of, and provide effective and evidence-based solutions for, the challenges of forced migration within host communities and thereby contributing to increased tolerance, peaceful coexistence, and reduced radicalization across Europe and in the Middle East.

Ø Conduct state-of-the-art research on host-community-refugee relations and develop solutions for the successful coexistence of host communities and refugees.

Dimensions:

• Research

Contribute to the evidence base on understanding refugee/host community relations through addressing the central research question:  How do different patterns of the socio-economic integration of refugees influence the socio-psychological dimensions of refugee- and host-community relations, and vice-versa ?    

• Solutions

Develop and pilot test solutions to foster peaceful coexistence between refugees and host communities

• Policy engagement

Provide an overall framework for policy makers to adopt and adapt the solutions and recommendations for the adoption of effective policies and practices in diverse settings.

CSS role description

The CSS will lead the fieldwork implementation by coordinating the all related tasks also in Germany, Sweden and Croatia by assuring a coherent methodology and a comparable perspective in all the due countries. In details, the CSS will implement a mixed-methods research based on qualitative and quantitative approaches in Jordan by recurring to a survey and a series of Focus Group discussion targeting refugees and host communities. The research will focus on identifying and analyzing opportunities and challenges for integration that will be translated into solutions which can be in diverse communities and are accessible to policy makers.