The project
The questions of how life plans change in the face of war and how and why they influence refugees’ migration movements are not fully understood. On the one hand, war and displacement deeply interrupt and alter people’s previous life plans. On the other hand, forced migrants develop coping strategies to deal with changing life realities and experienced trauma, including positive cognition focusing on hope and aspirations for the future.
Taking on a longitudinal perspective, the project SYREALITY (Syrian Imaginations of Europe meet Reality) focuses on Syrians who have settled in four cities across European countries since the outbreak of the conflict in Syria in 2011. By bringing together literature from psychology, sociology, migration and refugee studies, it investigates the following research questions: (i) how broader life aspirations influence migration decision-making in a context of forced displacement; (ii) which influence war and displacement have on life aspirations and social class; and (iii) how the context of reception in four different European cities impact their life aspirations and well-being.
SYREALITY builds on the Marie Curie project SYRMAGINE (Syrian Imaginations of Europe, 2017-2019) which studied Syrian refugees’ living conditions, migration aspirations and future imaginations in Lebanon and Turkey. The data which were collected in the frame of this project serve as a baseline to analyse how imaginations about life in Europe from the ‘outside’ meet realities inside Europe.
From an academic perspective, SYREALITY contributes to theoretical literature on forced migrants’ migration decision-making processes, drivers of (im)mobility, and the role of life aspirations and social class in forced migration. With Syrian refugees still constituting the largest group of within the estimated global number of forced migrants in 2022 (UNHCR 2022), Syrian displacement is key to understand forced migrants’ complex migration trajectories in a protracted refugee situation. The UNHCR estimates that approximately 6.9 million Syrians have been internally displaced and 5.7 million fled across international borders to neighbouring Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq (UNHCR 2021). Approximately one million sought refuge in Europe (UNHCR 2019).
The research design
SYREALITY follows a mixed-methods research design in four European cities (Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Athens) which is participatory, transnational, cross-national, and longitudinal: It combines a cross-national individual survey, narrative life history interviews and cognitive maps to understand refugees’ changing nature of challenges, opportunities, and daily itineraries over time. The project also reuses research data collected within the previous project SYRMAGINE, which include an individual survey and in-depth interviews collected in 2018 with Syrians living in Tripoli, Beirut (Lebanon), Istanbul and Izmir (Turkey). SYREALITY also draws on additional qualitative interviews conducted with Syrians inside Syria (Damascus, Aleppo, Idlib) in 2020.
The research locations
Read about the project in English:
Read about the project in Arabic:
Funding
The SYREALITY project is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under project number V 823-G, within the framework of its Elise Richter Programme and is developed in the University for Continuing Education Krems (Danube University Krems).
SYREALITY 