How Homeland Experiences Shape Refugee Belonging: Rethinking Exile,Home,and Integration in the Syrian Case

Abstract

Studies of refugee belonging, as a key facet of integration, primarily focus on post-flight processes. Adopting an approach to integration that is temporally and spatially broader, this article argues that refugees’ varied experiences of belonging or estrangement in origin countries fundamentally condition their subsequent experiences of belonging or estrangement in settlement countries. To explore this argument, the article develops a framework that distinguishes between the psychosocial and locational aspects of home, identifying five distinct categories of experience: home in the homeland, exile in the homeland, exile outside the homeland, home outside the homeland, or overlaps of exile and home across borders. The article illustrates these categories in the Syrian case, using original interviews with displaced Syrians and a range of texts by Syrian writers. In doing so, it demonstrates how knowing whether or how refugees found belonging inside their homelands before displacement enriches understandings of who refugees are, what they seek, and what home or exile means to them. While these pre-flight experiences cannot precisely predict integration outcomes, they shape the frame of reference that refugees carry into homemaking in refuge and, thus, the experiences of belonging that they develop there.