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In 2015 the global media fixated on the 'Syrian crisis' that became the 'refugee crisis' for Europe. This construction of crisis was Eurocentric, temporally narrow and presented as problem for European nation states. We view the 'problem' rather as the nationalism and racism of receiving countries with a resurgence of a discourse of ethno-nationalist European identity sharpened by the global financial crisis and neoliberal austerity. Despite disparate national histories, we discern: a 'blame-the-victim' tendency to view those most harmed by the 'refugee crisis' as the 'problems' that constitute it; a state-centred perspective that requires the 'problem' to be addressed by nation states; a 'charity starts at home' ideology, usually from those sectors of society that are least willing to extend compassion 'at home'; a systemically cruel state disposition towards asylum seekers as part of a regime of deterrence from seeking asylum in that state; a racialised and gender-blinkered regime of determination of refugee status; a politically opportunist populism that deploys ethno-nationalist 'othering' or scapegoating in times of economic distress and political instability; a wilful and convenient blindness to the histories of the contemporary conflicts as the legacies of colonialism; a globalised Islamophobia, casting Muslim asylum seekers as a potential security threat and undermining of national (or 'western', or civilisational) values; a gender-inflected racialisation that demonises the asylum-seeking other as hyper-patriarchal and occludes or minimises the patriarchy of the 'civilised' west. *repeats six paras on* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders the 2005 Cronulla riots after ten years. We begin by examining three examples of events misread ten years ago, to illustrate some key changes that have since shaped Australian racism. The first two, concern the rallying call to ‘Leb and wog bashing day’ at Cronulla in December 2005, and the attack there on two Bangladeshi students. These are shown to be indicative in a shift in the focus of racist Othering in Australia, from the ‘Arab Other’ to the ‘Muslim Other’, as Islamophobia becomes increasingly mainstreamed in Australian culture following the trend throughout the global West. Second, the incongruous chivalry-cum-feminism of the beachgoers who participated in the riot and were interviewed in the 2006 Four Corners television documentary, Riot and Revenge, illustrates some key features of Islamophobia as it has developed and become entrenched: such as accusing Muslims of hyperpatriarchy, and purporting to ‘rescue’ Muslim women while targeting them for racist vilification. We trace these and related ideological elements of Islamophobia inherent in the Cronulla riots, and show how these have unfolded in the Australian mainstream in the ten years since, becoming further enfolded into the commonsense as part of the ‘new normal’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including racist populism, populist far-right politics and ethno-nationalism in the Netherlands.

This article draws on research into racist vilification experienced by young Arab and Muslim Australians especially since 11 September 2001, to explore the links between public space, movement and national belonging, and the spatial regulation of cultural difference that functions in Australia. The authors analyse the way that the capacity to experience forms of national belonging and cultural citizenship is shaped by inclusion within or exclusion from local as well as nationally significant public spaces. While access to public space and freedom to move are conventionally seen as fundamental to a democratic state, these are often seen in abstract terms. This article emphasises how movement in public space is a very concrete dimension of our experience of freedom, in showing how incivilities directed against Arab and Muslim Australians have operated pedagogically as a spatialised regulation of national belonging. The article concludes by examining how processes associated with the Cronulla riots of December 2005 have retarded the capacities of Muslim and Arab Australians to negotiate within and across spaces, diminishing their opportunities to invest in local and national spaces, shrinking their resources and opportunities for place-making in public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of heightened concern about the second generation of Muslim immigrants in connection with 'home-grown terrorism' and supposed refusal to 'integrate', this paper interrogates the common sense that the second generation is 'lost' between cultures. Informed by in-depth, open-ended, semi-structured interviews with young second-generation Lebanese-background immigrants, this paper presents empirical material from two cohorts of participants, one in 1997 and one in 2003. Five cases are considered here, three from 1997 and two from 2003: all Muslim young women. It is argued that, far from being 'lost', the young women are constructing blended identities which they reflect on consciously, under circumstances of everyday racism to which they respond strategically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on civil society in Australia between 1996 and 2007 related to former Prime Minister John Howard. The article discusses Howard's neo-conservative ideology and Liberal-National coalition, noting his views on political correctness. Howard's administration is also discussed in terms of immigration, multiculturalism, indigenous land rights, othering, and Islamaphobia. Information on the effect of Islamaphobia on Australian perceptions and the treatment of Muslims is also provided.

This article compares the rise of anti-Muslim racism in Britain and Australia, from 1989 to 2001, as a foundation for assessing the extent to which the upsurge of Islamophobia after 11 September was a development of existing patterns of racism in these two countries. The respective histories of immigration and settlement by Muslim populations are outlined, along with the relevant immigration and 'ethnic affairs' policies and the resulting demographics. The article traces the ideologies of xenophobia that developed in Britain and Australia over this period, It records a transition from anti-Asian and anti-Arab racism to anti-Muslim racism, reflected in and responding to changes in the identities and cultural politics of the minority communities. It outlines instances of the racial and ethnic targeting by the state of the ethnic and religious minorities concerned, and postulates a causal relationship between this and the shifting patterns of acts of racial hatred, vilification and discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 11 September 2001, Muslim minorities have experienced intensive “othering” in “Western” countries, above all in those US-led anglophone nations which invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to prosecute their “war on terror”. This paper examines the cases of Britain and Australia, where whole communities of Muslims have been criminalised as “evil” and a “fifth column” enemy within by media, politicians, the security services and the criminal justice system. Although constituted by disparate ethnic groups, the targeted communities in each of these nations have experienced similar treatment in the State's anti-terrorist measures, as well as ideological responses and everyday racism, making comparable the two cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the cause of the riot on Cronulla beach, Sydney, Australia, in December 2005. The riot is a mass racist violence of the Whites against young men that have Middle Eastern Appearance. The immediate cause was a fight between three surf lifesavers and four Lebanese young men. The violence mirrors the moves of the Australian government to reclaim control of the country from those who are seeking asylum and the Muslims or Middle Easterns.

Recent events in a ruling-class boys 'boarding school college in Sydney prompted public discussion about "bullying." Debate ranged between those seeing an endemic problem to be cured and those who saw minor, unfortunate, and atypical incidents in a system where bullying is under control. It is argued here that such practice is inherent in ruling-class boys' education. It is an important part of making ruling-class men. Using life-history methods with available biographical material, the article shows that ruling-class schooling of boys in boarding schools involves "sending away" and initial loneliness, bonding in groups demanding allegiance, attachment to tradition, subjection to hierarchy and progress upward through it, group ridiculing and punishment of sensitiveness and close relationships, severe sanctions against difference, brutal bodily discipline, and inculcating competitive individualism. Brutalization and "hardening" are essential to all these processes and are characteristic of ruling-class masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the challenges faced by youth workers in Australia in 2004 as a new generation of young people are creating identities that do not fit stereotypes. Tasks of youth workers in relation to in relation to teenagers who are at risk of becoming or remaining marginal; Basic forms of institution that shape the everyday life of the youth; Version of social control that must be adopted by youth workers towards more intercultural understanding among young people.

This article details a moral panic in 1998-2000 about "ethnic gangs" in Sydney's south-western suburbs and analyses its ideological construction of the links between ethnicity, youth and crime. It documents the racisms of labelling and targeting of immigrant young people which misread, oversimplify and misrepresent complex and class-related social realities as racial, and the common-sense sharing of these understandings, representations and practices by "mainstream" media, police and vocal representatives in state, local and "ethnic" politics. The data used in this analysis are largely comprised of English-language media extracts, press, radio, television — both commercial and government-funded; and national, state and local in circulation, supplemented by interview material, from an ethnographic pilot study, with Lebanese-Australian youth, Lebanese immigrant parents, ethnic community workers, community leaders and police. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a study which examined the mapping of ethnic identity among a group of Arabic-speaking youth in Southwestern Sydney. Dynamics of identity formation among adolescents in relation to interactions with friends, other language background youth and family; Strategic essentialism and hybridity among Arabic-speaking youth.

This paper examines the 'mapping' of ethnic identity amongst a group of Arabic-speaking youth in south-western Sydney. Informed by theoretical approaches to questions of ethnicity which emphasise its multiple and fluid nature, the paper explores the dynamics of identity formation among adolescents in relation to interactions with friends, other language background youth and family, especially in the spaces between home and school. The processes of ethnic identity formation amongst these Arabic-speaking youth entail complex processes of 'othering'; a mapping of oppositions between and within cultures mobilising different categories and different notions of self and other. Their constructions of ethnic identity move between strategic essentialism—the assertion of the given-ness of their ethnicity—and a strategic hybridity—the mixing, in often contradictory ways, of elements of identification drawn from their parents' cultural background and their participation in Australian society. The boundaries drawn between ethnic identities ostensibly based on ethnic cohesion can be fluid and shifting, often depending on context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the ethnographic study on male Lebanese immigrants in Sydney, New South Wales. Evaluation on the performance of male students; Forms of ideological inversion; Identification on the terms of ethnicity and masculinity.

In Australia since about the turn of the millennium, discrimination against Muslims has been increasingly normalized, made respectable, and presented as prudent precaution against violent extremism. Vilification of Muslims has posed as defending 'Australian values' against those who will not integrate. Liberal political leaders and press leader-writers who formerly espoused cultural pluralism now routinely hold up as inimical the Muslim folk devil by whose otherness the boundaries of acceptability of the national culture may be marked out and policed. The Muslim Other is positioned not only as culturally incommensurate, but dangerously so: dishonest, criminally inclined, violent, misogynist, homophobic, backward, uncivilized. On the far right, extremist nationalist organizations incite racist hatred under cover of this rhetoric, often cloaked as reasonable common sense. This paper undertakes an ideology analysis of political and media discussion, and examines the forms of social control that they advance and sustain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the theme of belonging in migrant generations, which is the topic of research papers in this issue of "Journal of Intercultural Studies." Victoria Mason, author of "Children of the 'Idea of Palestine'," focuses on exile generations and renegotiation of identity by those who have never had a homeland experience. Susanne Wessendorf writes about second-generation Italians in Switzerland. Paul Scheibelhofer focuses on second-generation Turkish youth in Austria who define their identity in terms that suggest radical individualism, strategic essentialism, and pragmatism.

This paper explores migration stories and examines the ways migrants use their gardens as sites of cultural practice in the Fairfield municipality of Western Sydney, one of the most ethnically diverse regions in Australia. We argue that many of those from diverse cultural backgrounds use their gardens in ways very different from the stereotypical conceptions of Australian suburbia. Far from being idyllic places of retreat and repose separate from the world of work, our research reveals that many migrant gardens are places in which creative labour is expended to symbolise connections not only to homeland but also to Australia and to other cultures. We concentrate in this paper on two general patterns of backyard activity. The first is intensively horticultural, involving creating a backyard smallholding for growing produce traditional to the homeland. Secondly those, mainly from urban or middle-class backgrounds, who transform their backyards into exhibition spaces, outlets for their creative impulses as artists and amateur curators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the advent of multiculturalism in Australia in the 1970s, 'ethnicity' has acquired not only cultural and social importance, but significant political consequences as groups mobilised around 'ethnic communities' and as the State increasingly structured social policy around cultural differences. The political patronage and funding central to Australian multiculturalism led to the development of organisations and leaders whose task was not only to service the needs of specific 'ethnic communities' but to represent them in the wider political field. This paper traces the emergence in Australia of the field of ethnic politics, in the Bourdieusian sense. Using the Lebanese 'ethnic community' as a case study, we analyse the accumulation by 'community leaders' of 'ethnic capital', which converts to symbolic capital that is recognised by the State as the capacity of leaders to represent ethnic communities. We argue that conflicts arising over moral panics around 'Lebanese youth gangs' in Sydney since 1998 have undermined the legitimacy of Lebanese community leadership. This has coincided with moves by the NSW government to devalorise 'ethnicity' and substitute it with 'communal relations', which accord with the national shift away from multiculturalism under the Howard government, as the politics of 'One Nation' are increasingly mainstreamed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]