Years of refugee life in Serbia - challenges for a new beginning: stay or return home?

Abstract

The paper represents project results of a multi-year long research on the problem of refugees. First, we started from the fact that although the number of refugees in Serbia is decreasing, their social status has been bad for years and the qualitative changes are slow. We tried to answer the question relating to the changes in number and quality of collective centres. Secondly, we analyzed the relationship between refugees and domestic population. We confirmed the hypothesis that refugees from Croatia and Bosnia after years of living in Serbia hope to integrate their community into the host society. Thirdly, there is no doubt that repatriation in Croatia and Bosnia is the most acceptable solution for the majority of refugees, but it is not the realistic solution due to security issues, property security and full-time employment in the places of their origin.