Refugee-adjacency and the unrecognised grief of those left behind, part 2

Refugee-adjacency and the unrecognised grief of those left behind, part 2

Lauren Banko
Then & Now

What does it mean to be ‘refugee adjacent’? The first part of this post told the story of Doris, a young Jewish woman who came to Palestine from Romania in 1941. Her family and fiancé died before they could join her when the vessel they were travelling on, the MV Struma, was torpedoed off Istanbul in February 1942. Doris was left destitute. Unlike her family, Doris was never a refugee: a British subject by birth, she had come to Palestine on a tourist visa and was eventually repatriated to Britain. But her proximity to refugeedom is obvious, in the loss of her home in Romania and the possibility of a home in Palestine, in the loss of her material possessions, and in the loss of her family, all refugees when they died. This second post tell the story of Ahmad, another refugee-adjacent individual, who left Palestine a few years after Doris.

Refugee-adjacency and the unrecognised grief of those left behind, part 1

Refugee-adjacency and the unrecognised grief of those left behind, part 1

Lauren Banko
Then & Now

Historians have often explored what it means to be a refugee. But what happens to refugee history when we consider how and with what consequences people do not become labeled as refugees? This two-part blog post tells the story of two individuals who might have been refugees, but didn’t: a young Jewish woman who left Romania for Palestine in the early 1940s, and a young Muslim man who left Palestine a few years later. They are ‘refugee-adjacent’ individuals: people whose families became refugees or forcibly displaced persons, but who themselves did not. A refugee-adjacent individual has not been labelled as a refugee or displaced person. But they are deeply affected by what Peter Gatrell has termed refugeedom.

Precarity of welcome: review of Becky Taylor's Refugees in Twentieth-Century Britain

Precarity of welcome: review of Becky Taylor's Refugees in Twentieth-Century Britain

Katherine Mackinnon
Reviews

In her book Refugees in Twentieth Century Britain, Becky Taylor carefully explores the reception, experiences and significance of refugees in Britain across the twentieth century. Time and time again, she demonstrates how closely bound up the refugees’ lives have been with the British public’s own experiences of changing political and social factors, whether these two groups come face to face or not, and however much of a gulf the media may lead people to believe exists between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Making sense of a huge range and diversity of sources, the book beautifully demonstrates the complexities and contradictions of British society, and the many ways refugees encountered these complexities.

Humanitarianism in Newfoundland: the rescue of Tamil refugees in 1986

Humanitarianism in Newfoundland: the rescue of Tamil refugees in 1986

Rahul Balasundaram
Then & Now

On 11 August 1986, after five days adrift off the coast of Newfoundland, two lifeboats carrying 155 Tamil refugees fleeing the armed conflict in Sri Lanka were rescued by local fishermen. A fast-track refugee decision process that allowed them to be issued renewable one-year permits enabling them to live and work in Canada. The decision to grant Minister’s permits was controversial, especially when it emerged that the refugees had departed from West Germany, a ‘safe state’. But on the whole, media discourse was welcoming. This post revisits the incident in the light of present-day refugee policy in Canada and elsewhere.

Methods in refugee history – call for papers

Methods in refugee history – call for papers

Benjamin Thomas White
Announcements

We are pleased to announce the third round of seminars in our series, Doing Refugee History, supported by the Institute for Historical Research and RefugeeHistory.org. This set of seminars will explore the subject of Methods in Refugee History and will run from March to May 2022.

The purpose of this set is to explore the role of method in doing refugee history, by examining both the use of conventional research methods and the emergence of innovative new methodological approaches. We welcome contributions that discuss the relationship between methods, analysis and argument in the sub-field of refugee history.

From the 1951 Convention to the 1967 Protocol: how the refugee regime was globalized

From the 1951 Convention to the 1967 Protocol: how the refugee regime was globalized

Benjamin Thomas White
Then & Now

How should we understand the globalization of the international refugee regime? A conventional understanding is that the 1951 Refugee Convention, although it put in place a universal definition of ‘refugee’ for the first time, remained limited to European refugees. But the 1951 text was not as limited as people think. Most of the initial signatories intended the convention to be applied to people displaced from anywhere, not just from within Europe. And the decisive momentum for globalization was created by African states newly independent from France.

Border-crossing: History Dialogues between camp and campus

Border-crossing: History Dialogues between camp and campus

Marcia C. Schenck & Kate Reed
Refugees Today

Refugees living in camps are often not perceived as historians for ‘historically explicable reasons’, to borrow Bonnie Smith’s phrase. They do not do the things historians do because they cannot: they cannot consult archives, they cannot access university libraries (or, often, libraries at all), they cannot depend on reliable internet and computer access, let alone the funding, research support, training, social networks, and material resources that underpin the research and writing of academic history. It is as though encamped refugee and historian have been defined as mutually exclusive identities. A person residing in a refugee camp cannot be a historian because a historian, quite simply, cannot be a person residing in a refugee camp.

What if we were to disrupt this tautology? To redefine what being a historian means?

Hopehood across the frontier: permanent transience at Kakuma refugee camp

Hopehood across the frontier: permanent transience at Kakuma refugee camp

Gerawork Teferra
Refugees Today

Kenya has received more than half a million refugees since 1991. However, except for two instances of group resettlement, very few refugees received resettlement opportunities. During the last decade, for instance, only 37,522 people have been officially resettled, despite many more arriving. Kakuma camp, however, has become known as a ‘resettlement hub’ and, as I show in this post, the lives of residents are affected by such perceptions. I discuss how refugees move from the hope of surviving to a new, dream-like lifestyle which the term “hopehood” encapsulates. In doing so, I argue that though hope has served as an instrument to enable people to endure prolonged encampment in an enclosed place, unrealistic hope has separated residents from reality, so that chasing a rare chance of resettlement becomes itself a mode of life.

Apartheid refugees: literature and exile

Apartheid refugees: literature and exile

Benjamin Lawrance & Vusumuzi R. Kumalo
Refugees & Representation

In August 1960, the Black writer and musician Dugmore Boetie fled apartheid South Africa and entered Bechuanaland (today Botswana) on foot. Boetie was one of thousands of refugees from apartheid. Unlike most, he returned soon afterwards—and his novel Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost is the only book describing apartheid by a Black writer residing in South Africa in this period.

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