Waves of migration: a Vietnamese refugee boat journey in numerical modelling and oral history

Waves of migration: a Vietnamese refugee boat journey in numerical modelling and oral history

Joy Damousi, Filippo Nelli, Anh Nguyen Austen, Alessandro Toffoli & Mary Tomsic
Then & Now

The journeys of people who have been forced to leave their homes have, over centuries, included travel across water, including rivers, oceans, and seas. This post presents a new approach to researching refugee boat journeys by sea, based on a collaboration between historians and ocean engineers. We have used oral history research with survivors of a particular boat, rescued off Vietnam in June 1982, alongside numerical modelling so that the sea state the boat travelled through and the specific movement of the boat in those conditions could be determined. The scientific analysis explains how the ocean and weather, paradoxically, both created the conditions that were dangerous for this vessel, but also placed it in a position where it was rescued.

UNHCR’s first urban refugee policy, 25 years on

UNHCR’s first urban refugee policy, 25 years on

Neil J.W. Crawford
Then & Now

On 25 March 1997, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) released its first global policy relating to urban refugees. Though UNHCR had always worked in towns and cities since its establishment in 1950, the agency itself viewed this work as peripheral to its main mission. By the 1980s and 90s the organisation had become firmly associated with large rural camps on the borders of states. A landmark piece of global refugee policy, the UNHCR Comprehensive Policy on Urban Refugees put down on paper for the first time a single, though contextual, approach to working in urban areas. But the March 1997 policy came under immediate criticism, and lasted less than nine months.

Trickster narratives in the memoirs of Germans displaced from Eastern Europe, 1944-48

Trickster narratives in the memoirs of Germans displaced from Eastern Europe, 1944-48

Arddun Arwyn
Then & Now

Trickster narratives are particularly useful in exploring the complexities of refugee histories. Refugees are often marginalised and portrayed as either one-dimensional ‘innocent’ victims or as a threatening ‘other’. Analysing such narratives allows for more nuanced understandings of how refugees negotiate power relations and enact agency. Refugee trickster narratives communicate difficult and exceptional experiences through stories that are commonly recognised, thus highlighting their shared humanity and helping to break down stereotypes. Most interesting is the prevalence of the trickster narrative through time and across cultures, as it reveals a deep human impulse to tell stories of triumph in the face of physical and social marginalisation.

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.

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