Displacement Governance and the Illusion of Integration offers an inspiring and insightful contribution to contemporary issues of migration, marginalization and integration. By thoroughly examining a series of timely theoretical issues such as vulnerability, deprivation, and the dominant narrative regarding the integration of migrant newcomers in contemporary urban environments, Shearer Demir’s approach succeeds in both highlighting the weaknesses of the existing narrative and bringing together innovative theoretical frameworks with everyday political and social practices.

Throughout the concepts of vulnerability, resilience and integration the book manages to go beyond the hegemonic discourse of those terms via the lens of intersectionality by focusing on the transformative forces of those in community and grassroot level initiatives.

The primary focus of Shearer Demir’s insights center into summarizing and exploring in depth the issues of displacement and vulnerability, as well as to connect the everyday lives of urban and rural communities of the displaced with the ever-increasing number of precarious long-term residents in each region. The development and detailed explanation of theoretical frameworks throughout the chapters of the book demonstrates a coherent commitment to the issue and leaves open channels of communication with contemporary forms of political and activist action based on solidarity and equality.

The book offers a great overview on the notion of displacement, extending its mainstream terminology and exceeding the classical understandings around it. It manages to view displacement as a process in a multi-layered and multifaceted way, combining societies’ inner marginalities against the dominant conception of migration as a one-time mobility.

In the author’s approach, the “illusion of integration” in current migration policies is highly criticized, arguing that current governance models often create a false sense of integration, where newcomers are superficially included without addressing the underlying power imbalances or truly meeting their needs and calls through a refreshing conception of meta-integration. Viewing Marinaleda’s village as a vivid example of commoning and direct democracy practices that manage to make a shift from heteronomy to autonomy, the concept of meta-integration offers some encouraging potentialities yet to be explored.

It is particularly important that the methodology of the book is based not only on a significant literature review but also on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted, reflecting on the author’s work in the field with displaced communities and newcomers, carried out between 2015 and 2019 in the northern Mediterranean region, concentrating on Greece, Italy, and Spain, and also making observations on France and Türkiye. Especially going through initiatives in Spain and Greece (both part of a broader network) that operate within the framework of municipalism gives refreshing examples of how the principles of horizontality, direct democracy and proximity can offer new ways of collective organization between the displaced and the local communities in less urbanized areas. Those values interconnected with the active collaboration in a broader sphere, together with autonomous initiatives, activists and organic intellectuals can give an encouraging potentiality in times when, as mentioned “temporality and transit cities” have become a permanent place of inhabitance of the displaced.

Shearer Demir’s book manages to go through a wide range of contemporary examples to propose new forms of community governance, drawing on cases from theories of direct democracy and municipalism, as well as direct examples of successful community self-organisation through equality and solidarity. It highlights the positive outcomes of local initiatives, which, despite facing restrictive policies from centralized authorities, have managed to address the immediate needs of displaced individuals. In addition, the promising concepts of politics of proximity and temporal continuity seem to gain ground according to the cases studied in the text, portraying the potentialities of a social-political transformation process.

Drawing now on some of the book’s fragilities regarding the theoretical framework, we could state that some conceptual terminology could need a further development. Some key concepts like “meta-integration” are described sometimes as a method and sometimes as a process, lacking a solid literature review, which can be somewhat abstract throughout the text and could possibly be analyzed more deeply. Furthermore, the examples drawn from initiatives and autonomous groups in Greece, Italy, and Spain may not fully translate universally to other cultural and geopolitical contexts. Also, the Gramscian term regarding organic intellectuals, which is vividly proposed in various cases in the text, creates the need of more of the authors’ actual experience records.

Going through the very interesting references regarding encounters and observations in the field of the research, it seems that a more in-depth reference to the content of the interviews with migrant newcomers, marginalized long term residents, members of autonomous initiatives, organic intellectuals, and broader stakeholders in each region, could shed more ethnographic light into the analytical frame of the whole book. This aspect could give the well-analyzed theoretical proposals of the book an extra mile in the ongoing run regarding the wider approach of the communities of the displaced and their everyday experiences.

It is of great importance that Shearer Demir puts into discussion throughout the book burning questions regarding the condition and definition of the displaced communities, the interconnections in-between long-term residents’ precarity and newcomers’ marginalization according to urban-periphery and temporal-permanent distinctions. Collective entities, like the initiatives mentioned in Thessaloniki, Kilkis and Palermo from Shearer Demir’s research, show that an approach that tries to bridge the gap between communities of the displaced and long-term residents is possible, especially on a smaller scale. Those initiatives address a spectrum of ideas and practices for collective action through the lens of autonomy, feminism and solidarity which goes beyond the dominant framework of the nation-state’s oppression and mainstream NGOs’ philanthropy.

Concluding to the analytical core of the book the conceptualization of a Community Co-Construction Framework/CCF, as a transformative process that combines the municipalist principles, collective self-management and the creation of common spaces, emphasizing in non-hierarchical, non-patriarchal and grassroots approach, could positively respond to the specific needs of communities of the displaced. Additionally, it serves as a connecting point for organic intellectuals to experiment with different strategies in solidarity with other struggles.

The author’s approach vividly proposes his political stance, mentioning various times within the text the dominant narratives, the structural injustices together with the hegemonic approaches on issues of migration, displacement as well as on integration and resilience mainstream narratives, trying to inspire alternatives that go beyond the colonialities of power (hierarchical, patriarchal) and imagining beyond the idea of nation-states.

In times of marginalization, border regimes and multifaced displacement of migrant newcomers, together with the gradual erosion of prior welfare state provisions in capitalist metropolises, Shearer Demir’s book aims to inspire displacement-affected communities and inform practitioners and policymakers about alternative approaches to governance that prioritize human dignity and rights, ultimately encouraging a more horizontal and decentralized focus in social movements and solidarity initiatives.

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