Manuscript under review

R&R (Political Research Exchange)

This study presents an original mapping of organisations led by forcibly displaced and stateless persons (DSP) in Europe. Based on a multilingual survey of 100 organisations conducted between December 2024 and March 2025, it provides an overview of their goals, activities, and challenges, highlighting their critical role in humanitarian action, advocacy, and social cohesion. The mapping reveals a dynamic of crisis-driven formation: DSP-led organisations often emerge during acute displacement events, filling gaps in humanitarian assistance and advocacy. This also reveals a potential fragility: organisations created in response to emergencies face sustainability challenges, raising questions about their longevity and capacity to institutionalise beyond the immediate crisis. Those that do manage to institutionalise, demonstrate remarkable resilience, often sustaining activities through innovative resource mobilisation, strong community networks, and partnerships with other civil society actors. Most of these organisations operate with limited resources at the local level and prioritise meeting urgent needs such as housing, legal assistance, and social support, while challenging narratives that portray refugees as passive recipients of aid. Recognising and supporting this agency through targeted funding, capacity-building, and formal inclusion in policy processes is essential to strengthen humanitarian responses and promote inclusive governance processes.  

Econstor working paper here

Open access interactive dataset here

Manuscript under review

How do citizenship policies shape immigrants’ resilience during economic downturns? We examine this question in Spain, where a dual-track naturalization regime allows nationals from selected countries—primarily Latin American—to apply for citizenship after two years of residence, while most others must wait ten. We argue that stratified access to citizenship conditions crisis resilience through two mechanisms: material insurance, by accelerating access to rights, mobility, and secure employment; and status resources, by influencing recognition, credibility, and opportunities for contact with native-born citizens. Empirically, the chapter combines municipal census data, cross-sectional surveys from Spain (2007) and the Basque Country (2010–2023), and pre-crisis focus-group transcripts (2007). The results show that the 2008 Great Recession widened differences across eligibility tracks. Fast-track immigrants experienced faster post-crisis naturalization, better economic trajectories, and steeper growth in participation in native associations than standard-track immigrants. Pre-crisis qualitative evidence suggests that citizenship already operated as both protection and recognition, helping explain why the downturn amplified these disparities.

How do forcibly displaced populations exercise political agency under conditions of legal precarity and uneven institutional recognition? This study examines refugee-led organizations (RLOs) in the United Kingdom and Germany, asking why some become publicly recognized and institutionally credible actors while others remain fragile or marginalized. I argue that these differences are explained not only by resources and opportunity structures, but also by legitimacy regimes: host-country configurations of recognition and gatekeeping that determine which organizations are treated as credible and fundable interlocutors, and on what terms. Drawing on exploratory evidence from three semi-structured interviews, a multilingual organizational survey (n = 15) and contextual evidence from DEL panel data on public attitudes, the study shows that RLOs operate as hybrid public intermediaries under unequal conditions of recognition. The findings suggest that formalization can facilitate recognition without ensuring secure organizational functioning, that external recognition and internal legitimacy do not necessarily align, and that legitimacy conditions how organizations manage visibility, risk, and public engagement. This chapter contributes to research on refugee political agency by identifying legitimacy as a central mechanism structuring forcibly displaced collective action.