Friendships, Connections and Relationships

This chapter shows how unaccompanied migrant and refugee young people are individuals driven by feelings and impulses as much as they are rational actors. Young people took extraordinary risks to protect their friends, and these actions shaped their trajectories. Sometimes the question of where young people ended up staying in Europe was the result of the friendships they forged there, both with co-nationals and in other cases with members of the host community, such as civil society volunteers who made them feel welcome. The chapter also documents how, as they sought to construct their own lives, young people also sought to reach beyond their subjective aspirations to help one another, build and sustain relationships, and live within communities of care. In this context, the collective aspect of capabilities is important. The ways in which young people work together to support one another was never more apparent than in the research team itself. The entire research project would have been impossible without the ties of trust and friendship forged, renegotiated, and strengthened within the team over time, and which have been sustained beyond the life of the project.