This Handbook brings together the viewpoints of academics, practitioners, artists and people seeking refuge in Scotland to explore the global learnings that can be gained from this context. The book engages with the challenge of delivering integration as multi-directional processes within a broader setting in which forced migration is often criminalised. Situating its analysis of integration in Scotland, the book combines chapters based in theory, which explore issues ranging from the concept of integration to law, borders and integration policy, with creative and practical responses to these issues. The book offers hopeful alternatives to current realities of forced migration, and a compelling challenge to dominant narratives related to refuge and integration. It will be of interest to practitioners, policymakers and scholars working with refugees and asylum seekers around the world.

This book will be open access under a CC BY ND licence.

Esa Aldegheri is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Glasgow, UK, investigating how unequal narratives and bordering of refugee journeys affect processes of integration. Her previous research supported the development of the third New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy. As a multilingual scholar, writer and educator she is also active in interdisciplinary projects beyond academia.

Dan Fisher is a political geographer and a research associate at the Centre for Public Policy, University of Glasgow, UK. His areas of interest are the practices of border control, processes of asylum determination and the governance of refugee integration. Dan has engaged widely with the policy community, including through his work with UNESCO-RILA which contributed to the development of the third New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy in 2024.

Alison Phipps holds the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow, where she is also professor of languages and intercultural studies and co-convener of Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network (GRAMNET).