ABSTRACT
This contribution argues that just as ‘history’ has been marginalised in refugee studies, so has hostility towards refugees and asylum seekers within a wide range of social science and humanities scholarship. It argues that the treatment of refugees/asylum seekers, though not without an element of positivity and ambiguity, is distinctive and largely hostile. There are bureaucratic, social, cultural and political traditions of hostility towards refugees and more recently asylum seekers. The state of refugeedom evokes a particular negativity which then impacts on behaviour towards refugees from state and public. Whilst such intolerance has its own unique characteristics, it is to be understood alongside other racisms and intolerances, intersecting and complicating them. This chapter aims therefore to encourage greater academic engagement with the history and contemporary manifestations of anti-refugeedom in both refugee studies and in wider literature on ethnic and racial studies, migration studies, the study of class, gender and sexuality and many other specialist and general fields.
