"In Sweden, the first Syrians who asked asylum as a refugee, arrived in 2012. Sweden initially received most of the Syrian refugees and was the first country in Europe to give immediate permanent residence to refugees coming from Syria.
International charity work to support Syrians started in this year but the larger wave of Syrians three years later, led to a sizeable popular solidarity movement, consolidated in the Swedish and Danish version of “Refugees Welcome” in September 2015.
An ever-growing network of volunteers across Denmark and Sweden, responded to the influx of refugees. Many Syrians took the route over the Öresund bridge from Denmark to Sweden. Some of the Syrians who arrived since 2012 continued their civil society activism and formed social networks across the Öresund, building up resilience networks that operate between Copenhagen and Malmö in the Öresund region. Syrians started to build relationships with Swedish and Danish civil society activists and have since joined in organising a variety of public events ranging from arts exhibitions, theatrical performances, civil society street demonstrations, developing platforms in the creative industries and organising informal events within a Syrian context. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation and semi-structured interviews carried out in Sweden and Denmark during 2014 and 2018, this paper maps out the challenges of these events and how these activities contributed to the resilience and coping strategies of Syrians to adjust to their new lives in the Öresund region.
Photo by Ra Dragon on Unsplash
2019-09-02