Authors

Raluca Bejan¹; Marie Mallet²;  ¹ Dalhousie University, Canada;  ² The University of Oxford, UK

Discussion

The start of the war in Ukraine shed light on a new geo-political order. The traditional spheres of influence that have been in place since the end of the Cold War dismantled and triggered massive flows of people that do not typically embody the classic refugee figure: white skinned and European. 

Being white did not help Ukrainians from escaping Russian imperialism. However, Ukrainians fleeing their homeland benefitted from temporary protection that rapidly facilitated their entry into neighbouring European countries as well as the Anglo-American world. The European Council activated, for the first time in history, the Temporary Protection Directive for those fleeing Ukraine to assist them in accessing the EU labour market, as well as with housing and medical support. This Directive set the tone for the adoption of similar schemes outside the Eurozone. The UK launched a temporary sponsorship program for Ukrainians, in conjunction with a family reunification stream and a pathway for those with former residency rights in the UK. Canada launched the temporary Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET). 

Most of these programs have been implemented within a week after the start of the war and seemed open to unlimited numbers of Ukrainians. Involuntarily or not, they consequentially constructed Ukrainians as a privileged type of refugee, in stark contrast with those coming from Afghanistan, who did not benefit from provisional schemes of support and were restricted in entering the Western world at the start of the Taliban-lead Afghan crisis. “A Tale of Two Contexts” uses Canada and the UK as two case studies to conduct a realist knowledge synthesis review on what matters most in the categorization of people on the move as deserving or underserving of state protection. This work also explores the scholarlily literature on the topic in relation to the disadvantages and the advantages of temporary protection schemes versus classic refugee determination programs. Our methods included searches of targeted key words across the following databases: Sociological Abstracts; Oxford Scholarship Online; Pais Index; Research Library; CBCA Complete; Google Scholar; Factiva and Canada Commons.