Reorienting Integration: Key findings from a collaborative project on resettlement in Denmark

How is resettlement experienced among women and children from the DR Congo in Denmark? And how can this knowledge strengthen municipal reception programmes? These are some of the questions that a team of anthropologists have explored since 2022 as part of the collaborative research project ‘Reorienting Integration’ (2022-2027), funded by the Velux foundation. As the project is coming to an end, it is a good time to zoom out and share key findings and contributions, empirical, theoretical and methodological.

From integration to reorientation

In ‘Reorienting Integration’ we have been thinking through Sara Ahmed’s notion of orientation as it is defined in the book Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others from 2006. In a recent article in the journal Ethnography, we suggest that this allows for an understanding of resettlement as a non-linear and continuous process of re-orientation in time and place as well as for a critical perspective on power asymmetries involved as newly arrived families are guided in ‘the right’ direction As such, orientation represents a new way of conceptualising processes of resettlement among refugees that challenges the problematic and racialised notion of ‘integration’.

‘Women at risk’ and the policy of dispersal

Since 1989, Denmark has resettled approximately 500 refugees each year from refugee camps around the world. However, after the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015, the Danish government decided to stop the annual intake of resettled refugees. Then, in 2020, the Danish engagement with UNHCR was renewed by accepting an annual quota of 200 refugees with specific criteria; the people Denmark now wanted to accept for resettlement should have a background in the conflict-ridden Kivu provinces of the DR Congo, be living in UNHCR refugee camps in Rwanda, and belong to the UN category of ‘women at risk’.

Since 2021, approximately 600 single women and children from the DR Congo have thus been resettled in Denmark and spread across the country in accordance with the government’s policy of dispersal. More than 50 out of 98 municipalities have received one or more resettled families since 2021. Consequently, most families do not currently live near other newly resettled families.

A rich dataset detailing experiences of resettlement

To follow the families around in their new everyday lives, the project brought together a team of experienced university-based researchers (one professor, one assistant professor and one postdoctoral researcher) and five students on the Masters programme in Anthropology – each with an individual research project formulated within the overall focus on experiences and processes of resettlement. One project focused particularly on young people, one on mothers, one on the elderly, one on arrival and reception programmes, one on homemaking, one on bodies, one on religion and faith, and one on civil society and social networks (the resulting publications are available on the project website). With different geographical, thematic and empirical outsets, the projects have provided a broad and rich dataset on resettlement during the first few months and years (2022-2024).

Collaborations with local authorities, faith groups, NGOs and other actors

From the first day of the project, local municipalities, frontline workers and other practitioners expressed great interest in our findings. Due to the break in the reception of resettled refugees in Denmark, there was a lack of knowledge about processes of resettlement in general and about refugees from DR Congo in particular. We were invited to share our knowledge with municipal networks, religious congregations, and through workshops with social workers. This way of working – with a continuous dialogue with partners and people beyond academia –  suggests that the distinction between basic and applied research may be less relevant in a project like this that unfolds more like an ongoing conversation in and with the field.

Our findings have been published in a thematic report series, including a report on ‘best practice’, targeting municipal frontline workers. In collaboration with the Danish Refugee Council, we have developed a series of short information films for the resettled families, as well as other materials, including a graphic novel called Perspectives (in Danish Nuancer) by Mette Lind Kusk, targeting both resettled youth and the broader public. As such, the project has worked to shape and improve existing reception programmes with grounded and empirically founded evidence from the everyday lives of the refugees who were part of the study.

The value of social networks

One of the findings we have shared with practitioners concerns the policy of dispersal (fordelingspolitik) that, in practice, results in a small number of families for each municipality. As anthropologist Birgitte Romme Larsen demonstrated in a journal article from 2011, the policy rests on the notion that ‘integration’ is improved by placing newly arrived individuals and families in local Danish communities.

We found that newly resettled families experience high degrees of social isolation and loneliness when not resettled with others. Many of the resettled families have lived many years in refugee camps in Rwanda, often surrounded by significant others such as neighbours or relatives, who have supported the women in their everyday lives with childcare and the like. In Denmark, the women, most of whom are single mothers, are largely on their own. Families who have been resettled together or close to one another support and assist each other, logistically, practically and emotionally, in their new contexts. Our findings thus demonstrate the value and positive impact of local social networks – with other resettled families as well as with Danish neighbours or members of religious congregations –  on social inclusion and processes of resettlement.