“We Create a Nest and Then They Leave”: Rural Refugee Resettlement and Dynamic Trust in Iceland
2026-09-04
Policy makers increasingly promote refugee resettlement in rural areas. Despite trust being widely recognized as central to successful resettlement, little attention has been given to how trust is manifested in rural regions and whether urban‐based understanding of trust‐building governance practices requires adaptation for rural settings. Drawing on 111 interviews (2023–2024) with refugees, teachers, municipal social services employees and volunteers involved in resettling Syrian and Iraqi refugees in Iceland (2015–2021), we conceptualize rural trust as a relational process shaped by mobility, memory, temporality, and hypervisibility. Situating our findings within trust and migration governance debates, we show how small localities manage responsibilities typically handled by larger bureaucracies and thereby exhibit an overlap between interpersonal and institutional trust. We argue for reflective approaches that account for mobility and temporality, consider common socio‐demographic features of sparsely populated areas, while recognizing the heterogeneity of rural areas.