Bosnian Refugees in Britain

Abstract

The way in which migrants are incorporated into society varies according to which society is being examined. The British model is loosely based on notions of multiculturalism. Groups of migrants are considered to constitute a community and, through community leaders, the needs of the group can be conveyed to others. The same model has been used for the incorporation of refugees into society and informs current legislation and policy as well as the work of refugee support agencies. Furthermore, research on refugees often looks at one or more refugee `communities'. More recently, groups of refugees, including Bosnian refugees arriving in Britain as part of the UNHCR programme in December 1992, have been considered as transnational communities or as diasporas, that is, scattered communities. This article looks at the refugees themselves and the community associations that have been established and concludes that the associations exist largely as a result of the benefits that can be obtained through them and that there is no informal Bosnian community. Instead, there is a contingent community: a group of people who will, to some extent, conform to the expectations of the host society in order to gain the advantages of a formal community association, whilst the private face of the group remains unconstituted as a community.