We are pleased to announce a new Partnership Seminar Series with the Institute for Historical Research on Doing Refugee History. Across a year and a half of seminars, this series aims to create a new network of historians working on forced migration through time and space. We are currently seeking papers for spring/summer 2021, around the theme of Refugee times: seeking refuge in and beyond the 20th century.
London Imperial War Museum’s Refugees season refutes modern-day crisis narratives about refugees. It historicises displacement to address global refugee movements across the past century, striking a tough balance between providing a space for refugees to tell their own stories and presenting academic research.
Forced to Flee is an expansive exhibition covering a range of angles, from the triggers for displacement, the journey that refugees have made, crossing borders, refugee camps, and reception in the UK. The exhibition looks at historical situations as well as recent displacement, and some clear themes emerge. The strongest is an emphasis on the human, the personal experience. Another is the diversity of community responses to refugees arriving in the UK. The third is the focus on conflict as a cause of displacement—though this means other causes are neglected. Overall the exhibition is ambitious and timely.
The exhibition includes refugees from a wide range of contexts. All looked similar to me: they had all lived in camps, fled their own country, and suffered on the journey to arrive at a safe place. The exhibition makes you wonder about how they lived. There are things that give an incomplete impression, but overall it is a really nice exhibition.
There is nothing shocking, dramatic or distressing about Forced to Flee. It avoids representing any of the physical effects of forced displacement on the human body: anguish, injury, illness, destitution, death – or crying. The exhibition not only challenges the idea of the refugee as a silent suffering body, but interrupts the whole set of emotional relationships that go along with that idea. Forced to Flee spans a century of refugee history, but rather than taking each historical moment in turn, the exhibition follows the steps of a ‘typical’ refugee story: the departure, the journey, the arrival, the asylum procedure, the integration process.
This week we run a virtual round table about the Imperial War Museum’s Refugees season, especially the exhibition Forced to Flee. Drawing together the perspectives of researchers, practitioners, and those with lived experience of displacement, it seeks to engage with and reflect upon the scope and aims of the exhibition, its historical remit and comparisons, its artistic and curatorial choices, and its specific exhibits.
Is the 1951 UN Refugee Convention eurocentric? There are plenty of reasons to think so. But we should pause before we condemn it as hopelessly outdated and eurocentric. We need a better historical understanding of how states and refugees in the global south have participated in, expanded on, and responded to the convention.
Two weeks into 1947, Vaad Leumi (Jewish National Council) president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi wrote to Mandate Palestine’s high commissioner, Alan Cunningham, after receiving news from Peshawar and Bombay regarding an allegedly large number of Afghan Jewish refugees in India. A delegation of Palestine’s Jewish citizens originally from Afghanistan had recently warned Ben-Zvi that between 300 and 400 Afghan Jews – clustered in temporary housing in India and cared for by the charity of others – faced immediate danger as they waited on immigration certificates for Palestine.
Saudi Arabia is not a party to the main global refugee protection instrument, the 1951 Refugee Convention, nor does it have any specific domestic legal framework pertaining to refugee issues. Thirty-five percent of Saudi-Arabia’s roughly 30 million inhabitants are not citizens – and many come from important refugee-producing countries.
There is a long history of Palestinian refugees deploying petitions as part of their political activism. From the early aftermath of their dispossession in 1948 – known as the Nakba or ‘catastrophe’ – Palestinians have continually organised and submitted petitions to a range of international organisations. Most often, they appealed to the UN and its various bodies, particularly the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). But over the years Palestinian petitioners have also targeted the League of Arab States, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, among others. This was not an entirely new phenomenon for Palestinians after the Nakba: many had submitted petitions to the Ottoman Sultan (before 1918), and the British authorities in Palestine (from 1918-48). The legacy of this tradition might provide some explanation as to why petitioning remained so popular for Palestinians in exile, although it is not the whole story.
