People who comprise today’s mass migrations are the embodiment of an increasingly hurtful planetary interconnectedness between towering inequalities and hegemonies and human lives. The humanitarian crisis has turned into a fundamental crisis of humanitarianism. The crisis of humanitarianism builds up by the state borders increasingly militarized, equipped with one manner or the other of securitization, seeking to externalize the migrating people. Further, the governments seek to institutionalize and spatially segregate the people, whilst the resident population is subjected to programmatic inciting of racism and xenophobia. Racist eurocentrism pictures the West as democratic, and migrant people as non-democratic; it does not distinguish between individuals and political regimes; does not take into consideration the emergency situations from which they flee: it is thus a form of armed humanitarianism. The Balkan countries which were part of the Balkan Refugee route have become prison countries, custodians of the EU border. They conserve the image of the dangerous Balkans and consolidate Balkanism. A complex social work response includes individual, institutional, curricular, and research levels of reflection and intervention.

In the article, the authors pose a question: to what extent can we speak of social work practice in support of refugees in post-socialist Southeastern Europe given that in the region, which was part of the Balkans Humanitarian Corridor in 2015 and 2016, state-supported social work practice is very limited and very prescriptive at the same time? The vocal anti-refugee sentiment in Central and Southeastern Europe that accompanied the migrants can be said to stem from the nineteenth-century primordialism: the one-state, one-nation ideology that also was embedded in the very construction of post-socialist states after 1991. Consequently, refugees are seen as the ultimate danger to everything “ours,” to women, men, and children of purportedly pure-blooded ethnonational origin, threatening “our” transgenerational sense of cultural and pseudobiological homogeneity. The rising post-socialist ethnonational primordialism, intertwined with conservative neopatriarchal ideologies, directly affects human rights observance and social work education and practice. The predominantly government-funded social workers generally are neither trained nor encouraged to work with refugees, while the popular and party politics of hatred is directed toward those who support refugees, social workers included. Anti-refugee sentiment, culturalization, and neopatriarchy are rationalized with arguments of fear and care; protecting the cultural and biological homogeneity of native residents leads to processes that turn care into violence, and ultimately into coercive care.

Prior to the 1990s, social work in Eastern Europe lagged far behind its Western counterparts. Perceived as an activity for petite-bourgeois women in the early twentieth century, it was deemed an unsuitable activity by the communist regimes which came to power following the Second World War. The belief that socialism would be able to eradicate the need for social work interventions and would ensure the well being of every ‘human being’ was also prevalent at the time. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that, in Hungary, some university-level social work courses were terminated in 1948 and the Ministry of Welfare and the Social Policy Institute ceased their activities in the following year (Juhasz, 2003). In 1952, the departments of social work at universities in Czechoslovakia and...

A qualitative, mixed and partly covert research of the locally specific characteristics of deinstitutionalisation was carried out in Slovenia in 2015. The research showed that more than 20,000 adults with different disabilities still live in different long stay institutions and that there are not sufficient NGOs that would support community-based living. Deinstitutionalisation is viewed as a change for the worse and is therefore reduced to minor transformations of the existent long stay institutions, described in the study. The state worries that deinstitutionalisation would demand a more costly welfare system and the relatives of disabled people worry that deinstitutionalisation will increase privatisation of welfare and that the burden of care will fall on them, as is the case in many other post-socialist countries. Within the locally specific context of post-socialism, deinstitutionalisation needs to be a top-down social policy decision that will influence professional education in different areas of care work and will provide a re-training of the existing staff. The experiences of people who survived long stay institutions or still live in them need to become public knowledge, as learning from the lived experience might make the process of deinstitutionalisation more vibrant, efficient and useful for everyone. The study captured some of their experiences.

The systematic dehumanization of people with disabilities in peaceful times is magnified in times of war and during post-war periods, especially in regions and countries with prevalent medical-pathological approaches towards individuals with disabilities. This discussion combines historical, current, and anticipated impacts and integrates the experiences of practitioners and communities. Using critical social work and critical disability studies perspectives, we have questioned what we need to attend to in social work to ensure that, in war, we do not overlook people with impairments. We also ask how the lives of people living in long-term institutions have been affected and what has changed since the outbreak of war. Their rights have long been overlooked. The war zone in Ukraine provides a critical case study intended to increase sensitivity and understanding among academics and social work professionals about the needs and rights of people with disabilities, and about the multi-dimensional barriers and hazards, visible and invisible, that they experience in times of armed conflict and its aftermath. It is argued that this is a global and mainstream concern, not a marginal topic. New emphasis is given to social work's potential and shared responsibilities to contribute to the realization of the rights of people with disabilities in a war context, through training, research, practice, and policy.

Sri Lanka is one of many developing countries where poverty, neo-liberal economic exploitation, economic migration and traditional long-term injustice towards ethnic minorities, children, people with disabilities and women, have created difficult conditions for social work to truly become a human rights profession. This article links poverty issues with some social work issues such as the child's perspective and disability issues, both being important parts of universal human rights. Despite a long social work tradition—early social work training was established in 1952—social work is still a developing profession. The article gives a descriptive overview of the development of social work education since 1952 and provides an example of a successful international collaboration between the University of Colombo and the University of Ljubljana in order to develop social work education at the university level and to establish it as an academic discipline. It gives a case study analysis of the absence of the child's perspective in children's institutions and presents an example of good practice in working with children with disabilities. Both analyses show a need for more professional social workers in the country.