The article offers a new perspective on contemporary and past migration processes in the post-Soviet area by testing the usefulness of the concept of a migration cycle for the Russian case. By adopting the longue durée approach, we attempt to assess the advancement of Russia’s migration cycle, arguing at the same time that it constitutes an interesting, yet not an obvious case with which to test the utility of the concept. We postulate that, in tracking Russia’s migration trajectories in pre-1991 times, it is im-portant to account for both the flows between Russia as the-then state entity (i.e. the Tsarist Empire, later the Soviet Union) and foreign countries and the flows between Russia as the core of the empire and its eastern and southern peripheries. Our analyses show that while – taking into account statistical consid-erations – Russia has undoubtedly already undergone the migration transition, it has not yet reached the stage of a mature immigration country. We also contend that migration transition for Russia occurred internally – within the-then state borders – and revealed itself with its transformation from a Soviet re-public into a federative state.

The Schengen area tends to be commonly misconstrued in the public perception as being ‘border-free’, defined by the unrestrained mobility of people, goods and capital. In reality the so-called ‘internal borders’ are still marked by a fervour of activities, conducted by the various national state agencies created for the purpose of territorial protection. Identity and migration checks – which often strikingly resemble pre-Schengen border checks – special crime-prevention tasks and transnational operations of police-type forces, detention and the unrelenting transfers of asylum-seekers and forced returns of illegalised mi-grants (also of EU nationals) are only a few among the many responsibilities of the various border-guard formations. This paper, based on data from fieldwork with the street-level Polish Border Guards working in the Intra-Schengen border region on the Polish–German border, analyses the impact of different levels of institutional discretion: official, local and individual, with a particular focus on the officers’ behaviour and decision-making and on the role of discretion within the policy implementation of a specific proce-dure. Analysing the phenomenon of the forced returns (deportations) of EU nationals within the Schengen area, this paper exposes the nature of the little-known practice of cross-border transfers. It focuses on the phenomenon of a forced return of Polish citizens from Germany, specifically on the micro-level moment of transfer of custody between the German Federal Police (Bundespolizei) into the hands of the Polish Border Guards (Straż Graniczna) on the Polish–German border, looking at the procedural variations and the decision-making of the officers, especially in the context of its street-level echelon and its practical contribution to the concept of deportability.

In early 2021, over 5 million European Union (EU) citizens had applied for settled status to secure their right to continue to live, work and study in the United Kingdom (UK) after the country’s withdrawal from the EU (Brexit). In 2018, the Home Office launched a Statement of Intent to implement an application process for EU citizens through its EU Settlement Scheme. In the period leading up to Brexit, the UK gov-ernment assured EU migrants that their existing rights under EU law would remain essentially un-changed and that applying for settled status would be smooth, transparent and simple. However, the application process has resulted in some long-term residents failing to obtain settled status, despite providing the required information. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews with 20 EU migrants living in two major metropolitan areas in Northern England, this article discusses the significant barriers which EU citizens face in the application process. This situation particularly affects the most vulnerable EU mi-grants with limited English-language skills and/or low literacy levels as well as those who are digitally excluded. The study contributes to the growing body of research on the consequences of Brexit for vulner-able EU migrants in the UK, focusing specifically on Central and Eastern European migrants.

This contribution examines the legal powers that Dutch authorities have to restrict the right to free move-ment of mobile but ‘unwanted’ EU citizens, including measures that seek to expel and ban EU citizens from re-entering the Netherlands. The article defines ‘unwanted’ EU citizens as mobile EU citizens in re-spect of whom national authorities seek to take measures to restrict their right of residence, either on the grounds of their being an unreasonable burden on the Dutch social assistance system or in respect of public policy and public security. We analyse the relevant EU legal rules, their interpretation by the Court of Justice of the EU and their national implementation and application in order to show the legal con-straints faced by national authorities when seeking to restrict EU mobility. This legal study is supple-mented by a discussion of existing data on the number of EU citizens expelled or removed from the Netherlands. Our analysis suggests that, due to the legal protection enjoyed by mobile EU citizens against measures restricting their residence rights, the Dutch authorities encourage voluntary departure as a pragmatic solution to the presence of ‘unwanted’ EU citizens.

Poland is the leading country in pursuing its own citizens under the European Arrest Warrant (EAW), with the number of EAWs issued between 2005 and 2013 representing one third of the warrants issued by all EU countries (although some serious inconsistencies between Polish and Eurostat sta-tistical data can be observed). The data show that Poland overuses this instrument by issuing EAWs in minor cases, sometimes even for petty crimes. However, even though this phenomenon is so wide-spread, it has attracted very little academic interest thus far. This paper fills that gap. The authors scrutinise the topic against its legal, theoretical and statistical backdrop. Based on their findings, a theoretical perspective is drawn up to consider what the term ‘justice’ actually means and which activities of the criminal justice system could be called ‘just’ and which go beyond this term. The main question to answer is: Should every crime be pursued (even a petty one) and every person face pun-ishment – even after years have passed and a successful and law-abiding life has been building in another country? Or should some restrictions be introduced to the law to prevent the abuse of justice?

Pre-Brexit media discourse in the UK focused extensively on the end of free movement, the governance of European mobility, and its relationship with state sovereignty. This article, methodologically anchored in Critical Discourse Analysis, discusses how the potential post-Brexit deportee, namely the ‘Vile Eastern Eu-ropean’, is depicted by the leading pro-Leave British press. The Vile Eastern European is juxtaposed with a minority of hard-working and tax-paying migrants from the continent, as well as with unjustly deported Windrush and Commonwealth migrants. As the newspapers explain, the UK has not been able to deport the Vile Eastern European because of the EU free movement rights. The press links the UK’s inability to remove the unwanted citizens of EU countries with its lack of sovereignty, suggesting that only new im-migration regulations will permit this deportation and make the UK sovereign again. The article con-cludes that the media discourse reproduces and co-produces the UK ideology of deportability that has been the basis for the EU Settlement Scheme and new immigration regulations.

In contrast to the apparently stringent EU legal regime, the deportation of EU nationals is a law enforcement device widely normalised in many European countries. Concerning deportation prac-tices, the allegedly critical divide between EU citizens and third-country nationals does not seem to make much sense in practice for some – Eastern European – national groups. Initially, this paper explores the scope and scale of this increasingly salient component of the EU deportation system, by drawing on data supplied by national databases. Additionally, it examines why and how the depor-tation of EU nationals has gained traction across the European borderscape, a phenomenon that has much to do with rampant xeno-racist attitudes, widespread concerns over so-called ‘criminal aliens’ and, last but not at all least, the street-level management of poor populations and low-profile public order issues. Finally, this paper scrutinises the strength of institutional inertias in the management of enduringly subordinated – and racialised – Eastern European populations.

This article provides an isnād cum matn analysis of a hadīt transmitted by Hudayfa Ibn Asīd describing how an angel visits the unborn in the womb. During the visit, several things are predestined. The hadīt has a prominent position at the beginning of the chapter on predestination in the hadīt collection of Muslim. The article shows, how the arrangement of the material in that opening section, which has to be dated to the 9th century CE, had the effect of closing a debate whether the individual’s destiny in the hereafter is predestined.

In recent years, a number of Iraqi intellectuals have participated in a discourse on pluralism in Iraq that includes a call to address the traumatic collective experiences of the country’s ethno-religious minorities. Such a confrontation with the “wounded memory” of these minority groups – along with a rewriting of the modern history of Iraq to incorporate their stories – would be an important step in creating a new collective memory, one of cultural pluralism, that could lead to a true coexistence among all Iraqis. Since it is very difficult to carry out this process due to deep sectarian divisions within Iraqi society, literature provides an alternative cultural field for the deconstruction and reformulation of existing “master narratives”. The purpose of the article is to examine literary representations of the “wounded memory” of minorities in Iraq. The examples used here are related to the 1915–1916 Armenian genocide in the former Ottoman Empire and the 1933 massacre of Assyrians in the northern Iraqi village of Simele. They can be found in the following novels written in Arabic by Iraqi authors of Christian origin: At-Tuyūr al-‘amyā’ (The Blind Birds, 2016) by Laylā Qasrānī, Sawāqī al-qulūb (The Streams of Hearts, 2005) by In‘ām Kaǧaǧī, ‘Irāqī fī Bārīs: sīra dātiyya riwā’iyya (An Iraqi in Paris: An Autobiographical Novel, 2005) by Samū‘īl Šam‘ūn, and Fī intizār Faraǧ Allāh al-Qahhār (Waiting for Farag Allah al-Qahhar, 2006) by Sa‘dī al-Mālih. This article is divided into three sections. An introduction is devoted to the aforementioned discourse. The second and solely descriptive section consists of three subsections focusing on literary characters who experience and/ or witness the tragic events and/or tell others about them. The third section contains concluding remarks and refers to several concepts formulated by researchers in cultural memory studies.

This is a preliminary analysis of issues resulting from comparing two images present in the Indian tradition, in their Buddhist (‘device’ guarding the relics of the Buddha) and Epic (‘device’ guarding the Elixir of Immortality) variants. Both images are located within the range of the notions of the sacred. That complicates but does not prevent the reconstruction of ideological messages directed to their prospective recipients. They are illustrated by the fate of the ‘holy substance’ obtained after breaking into and destroying both devices. The first one sanctifies the principles of free access and free participation, the second – of inherited privilege and inherited exclusion.

Tunisian Arabic, in addition to words inherited and borrowed from Arabic, has a considerable number of loanwords taken from such languages as Berber, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, French, and English. The main purpose of this paper is the inquiry into the words of French origin, since it is from French that Tunisian Arabic has borrowed a considerable amount of loanwords, a process that continues especially in the fields of technology, medicine, and internet communication. Although French loanwords have already been subjected to various and even detailed investigations, it does not seem that this problem has been sufficiently elucidated, in particular from a theoretical point of view. Several proposals for different approaches to French loanwords in Tunisian are offered here for consideration.

This paper describes a unique memoir written by a soldier about his experiences during the Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905. The memoir is written in the Krimchak ethnolect of Crimean Tatar using Hebrew letters. This memoir changes our notion about the Krimchaks as a group of quiet, religious people, indifferent to their surroundings. The memoir’s author, Menahem Berman, appears as a person who takes an active part in different historical events of his stormy life, both in peacetime in Odessa before the war and after he was called up and during his journey through Siberia to fight in the war. He describes life in field conditions during the war in Manchuria and his life after the war in captivity in Japan. He is an observant man, taking notice of all that is around him and recording all the details and his impression of them. In this paper the content of the memoir will be discussed, and the quality of the manuscript is described. In a linguistical overview, the Krimchak ethnolect used in the memoir is shown to have an Oghuz grammatical form prevailing over the Kypchak form, and hence the ethnolect can be regarded as a patois of the basic southern dialect of Crimean Tatar. This paper also presents 100 initial sentences of the text in transcription and with translation and glossary.