Reflecting on Refugee History: Refugee Week 2021
By Hari Reed for Refugee History
As Refugee Week 2021 coincided with Refugee History's five-year anniversary, we have taken the opportunity to curate and republish a selection of pieces from our growing archive. These articles were chosen for two reasons: first, they tackle important issues in the field of refugee history, and second, they reflect many of the values and priorities of the Refugee History project. Our contributors include legal scholars, social scientists, economists, archivists, practitioners and academics working across the arts and humanities. The following selection showcases Refugee History's interdisciplinary approach to forced migration research and celebrates work that crosses disciplinary boundaries and brings sustained, evidence-based historical analysis to bear on a broad range of migration and asylum-based research topics.
A second priority demonstrated this week is geographical diversity. When Refugee History launched in the summer of 2016, many of our contributors provided useful historical reflections on events taking place at Europe's southern borders. In one of our earliest pieces, Aydan Greatrick argues that Europe's failure to respond adequately to the 'refugee crisis' was the result of a collective historical denial. Greatrick argues that this 'pathology of historical denial' made it 'difficult to produce policy solutions that fall outside of a narrow historical framework.' While not departing from European refugee history, we have in recent years begun to broaden our scope to encompass lesser-known refugee histories from across the globe. The pieces we have revisited during Refugee Week span the UK to North Africa, South Asia to Australia, and the Middle East to East Asia.
Refugee History in an Ever-Changing Present
In her comparative account of Second World War internment camps and twenty-first century immigration detention centres, Lisa Matthews offers a careful historical analysis of an urgent contemporary issue. As detention remains at the top of Britain's policy agenda, Matthews looks to the past to identify strains in anti-detention campaign narratives that can still be identified in refugee advocacy today. While such contributions respond directly to, and shed crucial light upon, contemporary asylum issues, we have also been careful not to allow the ebb and flow of current affairs to dictate the nature of our publications. Looking further back in time, it is not surprising to find that refugee histories of the mid-twentieth century are particularly well represented on our site. Our two most widely and internationally-read articles fall within this time period. Broadly speaking, both pieces describe moments in refugee history where the devastation of war, colonial and post-colonial state structures, and the strategic acceptance of certain refugee populations intersect to shape historical narratives of displacement and resettlement.
Ria Sunga describes the process by which 1,200 Jewish refugees were admitted into the Philippines between 1937 and 1941 as a result of resettlement programmes organised by the Philippine and US governments. Ria Kapoor, meanwhile, explores how those displaced by partition were treated by the newly-formed Indian state. She explains that the rehabilitation of refugees was viewed as an opportunity for self-legitimation in post-partition India, and thus '[t]o build the state was to build the refugee and vice versa.' Maja Janmyr's account of the refugee protection regime in Lebanon also falls within this mid-century research focus. Janmyr's is one of several incisive articles on the Refugee History site that consider the 1951 Refugee Convention from the perspective of decolonised non-signatory states. Janmyr describes how Lebanon helped draft, but never ratified, the legislation that remains the backbone of refugee protection today, forcing the UN Refugee Agency into a 'pragmatic but principled' relationship with a country in which one in five people is a refugee.
Representing Refugees Past and Present
Historical accounts of refugee representation - visual, linguistic and political - have featured prominently in contributions to Refugee History. One intriguing moment in the rhetorical history of refugeedom is described by Fiona Barclay, at the point when French settlers were repatriated to France from Algeria in the 1960s. As French citizens, the repatriates (known as pieds-noirs) were not refugees in any legal sense. Yet they considered themselves as such, Barclay explains, because they felt uprooted, rejected and out-of-place. Another account of refugee representation at a particular historical juncture is given by Robert Carr, who considers a collection of photographs taken by an aid worker in Kukes refugee camp in Albania on the day that NATO forces entered the town. Carr considers how these images differed to those splashed across the front pages of Australian newspapers to announce the resettlement of Kosovar refugees in Sydney.
Conversations around best practice in the representation of refugees are ever-evolving. Like many organisations, Refugee History has adopted a strict image policy, and we are sensitive to the terminology we use to describe displaced people. We refrain from publishing modern photographs of identifiable individuals, and we are selective about the archival images that we display on the site. Going forward, we will be inviting researchers, photographers and archivists to share images from international archives that reflect our image policy. We also invite submissions of artworks, photographs and other images produced by people with lived experience of displacement to be shared on our site.
Looking to the future, we are using this five-year milestone to reaffirm our commitment to publishing work by practitioners, academics based outside of Europe, and authors with lived experience of forced migration. As well as diversifying our publications and our image bank, we are looking to expand our small team; we are seeking a person with a relevant research background and lived knowledge of forced migration to join our advisory board. We will be providing further details shortly, but please contact info@refugeehistory.org for more information if you are interested in, or wish to publicise, this opportunity.
Header Image: Temporary Slovak passport issued in 1940 to a Jewish refugee family. Wikicommons.
