Reconceptualising ‘integration as a two-way process’

In this article, I advocate the reconceptualisation of ‘integration as a two-way process’. I argue that integration is, fundamentally, an issue of relational inequality, and conceptualising it as a one-way process constitutes problems of undesirability and infeasibility. I show the theoretical hiatus which characterises many dominant approaches to the two-way process, which leads scholars to build their work on internal contradictions and to implicitly (and often unintentionally) feed into a one-way integration discourse. I argue that as long as conceptualisations of integration as a two-way process reinforce a boundary between ‘people who integrate’ and ‘people who do not integrate’, they are unfit to avoid the problems of one-wayness which they intended to overcome in the first place. In the last part of the article, I put forward some initial building blocks for a new theoretical framework of ‘integration as a two-way process’ which is more attentive to the relational social processes that constitute integration.