Conceptualising Syrian war migrations: displacements, migrants’ rights and the major reception regimes

Abstract

This article focuses on the migration of people from Syria after the outbreak of the civil war. The ambition of the article is to develop and nuance the typology of migrations of Syrians and relate the categories of international migrants to their rights, as provided by various reception regimes. The proposed typologies may help us better to understand the complexity of the migrations and the inconsistencies in reception and humanitarian standards. We argue that migration trends, reception regimes and the positioning of the Syrian refugees and migrants are highly interconnected and dynamic factors, resulting in different regular and irregular flows and migrant statuses. Furthermore, it is maintained that the management of the Syrian humanitarian and refugee crisis has revealed – and probably more so than any other, comparable event – the variety of inconsistencies in migration and protection policies and the widespread lack of will for more equitable burden-sharing.