Performing refugeeness in the Czech Republic: gendered depoliticisation through NGO assistance

The article examines the gender micropolitics of non-governmental assistance to refugees in the Czech Republic – a post-socialist society which is becoming a country of immigration. It critically examines relations of power between refugees and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These NGOs act as mediators between refugees and the state, media, wider public and academic production of knowledge. It is argued that despite the important roles they play in securing refugees' access to rights, their assistance is often perceived as problematic by refugees. The article analyses these relations in a wider context of the institutions of the refugee system where the state has increasing power in defining the conditions under which NGO assistance to refugees is provided. The study is based on qualitative research among recognised refugees from the former Soviet Union living in the Czech Republic and local NGOs assisting them with integration into society. I demonstrate how particular forms of assistance and public representation depoliticise refugees in a sense of fostering rather than challenging unequal power relations that lock refugees in a position of clients lacking political means of influencing their place in a receiving society. This is done by conceptualising ‘a refugee’ as a performative identity that is being produced and enacted in feminised NGO spaces. The analysis highlights refugees' critical reflections on their position in the relations of assistance.     

The Imperial End: How Empire Overtakes Refugees in Jeremiah

ABSTRACT

Refugee studies, postcolonial studies, as well as political theory is used to argue that the portrayal of the Judeans who flee to Egypt, rather than those deported to Babylon, occupy the social space of the everyday conception of refugees in Jeremiah. By examining the narratives of chapters 42–44 in relation to the oracles against the nations (chs. 46–51), I show how the exclusion of the Egyptian group shores up the imperial turn represented in the OANs. After explaining the oracles' imperial character, a discussion follows of how reading them as imperial produces the Egyptian group as refugees in chs. 42–44. An exploration of contemporary discussions regarding refugees follows, enabling the claim that refugees are produced by the state. Finally comes, a broader discussion on how various discursive strategies excludes the Egyptian group of refugees in favor of the Babylonian deportees, supportive of an imperialized agenda.     

1911-1937年灾民移境就食问题初探

抗战前的民国时期,灾民逃荒现象极为普遍。灾发地政府因无力赈济自己的民众,或者出于推卸责任,放任其灾民四处流离,移境就食。流入地政府救济自己辖区灾民尚且不暇,自然不愿再为别区承担救济重任。再者,行政区划与经费的分配也限制了这种救抚他省灾民的欲望。因此,流入地对来境灾民无不驱逐出境或资遣回籍,而灾民在自己家乡确实又无以为生,迫不得已时只好重又外出。总起来看,整个灾发期间,灾民便是在灾发地与流入地的推来搡去之中艰难苟活。这一问题不是一地一隅所能解决,也远非一年一月所能一蹴而就,它需要各级政府的大力合作,需要对产生灾民的各种原因予以根治。然而,受时代条件所限,灾民的移境就食问题不能得到较好的解决,灾民的流离悲苦也就只能依然如故。     

Britishness, asylum-seekers and the northern working class: 1851

The arrival of a small group of Polish-Hungarian refugees in Liverpool in 1851 reveals a lot about contemporary political views in the United Kingdom. The refugees were members of General Wysocki's Polish legion, which had fought Russia and Austria during the Hungarian revolution in 1848-49. While British liberals had hailed the nationalist cause from a distance, they were made uneasy by the presence of the refugee republicans with radical ideas. For that reason, British liberals worked with the government to try to send the Hungarian refugees to the United States. On the other hand, tradesmen and artisans in Liverpool - who were drawn to the social democratic ideas of liberty expressed by the revolutionaries of 1848 - organized a successful campaign to grant the refugees asylum.     

Reluctant Humanitarians: British Policy Toward Refugees in Kenya During the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1940

Following the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, several hundred Eritrean deserters from the Italian army and several thousand Ethiopian officials, soldiers, and civilians fled to Kenya. British officials on the border, in Nairobi, and in London found themselves deeply conflicted over how to deal with these refugees. Sheltering refugees was costly, and it antagonised the Italians whose friendship (or at least neutrality) the British hoped to win in Europe and in eastern Africa. But vocal critics in London watched for any signs of mistreatment or forced repatriation of the refugees. Government officials themselves expressed a revulsion at the possibility of turning away or repatriating refugees who feared for their lives. Because of this humanitarian sentiment, Kenya sheltered the refugees until the liberation of Ethiopia, much to the dismay of government officials.     

Hybrid governmentality in practice: Territoriality and biopolitics in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh

This article discusses how the Rohingyas – a forcibly displaced community transformed the everyday lives and the territory of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Since August 2017, Cox's Bazar, a borderland of Bangladesh is hosting more than a million of non-citizens within 32 camps in its two subdistricts. Based on mobile ethnographic research, I argue – a. borderlands are sites where politics of territory intersects politics of identity. The Rohingyas' statelessness and perpetuated marginalization are the outcome of this politics between identity and territory of the nation-states. b. The state prioritizes the security of its citizens from the refugees. Consequentially, the state enacts combined mechanisms of biopolitical and territorial practices that physically demarcate the refugee camps and socially segregate the refugees. I introduce this combination of mechanisms as hybrid governmentality. In Cox's Bazar, the key mechanisms of hybrid governmentality include - labelling refugees based on political rationale and providing them with identification cards, enacting street level surveillance to ensure confinement of the refugees, and maintaining everyday separation between refugees and the citizens.     

太平洋战事前后国民政府救济难侨的活动

太平洋战事爆发前后,大批旅居南洋一带的侨胞为躲避战乱纷纷撤退归国。国民政府在财政极端困难的情况下,对归国难侨给予了积极的救济。在整个救济归国难侨的过程中,粤、闽、滇、桂等省在中央的指导与支持下,对于归国难侨、侨生以及国内的侨眷采取了积极的救济措施。太平洋战事爆发前后各地救济归国难侨的活动反映了政府在处理紧急事件方面开始有了一定的经验,同时也是抗战期间中华民族共同抵御外侮的团结互助精神的集中体现。     

(Dis)(em)placing gender at Ukwimi: refugee resettlement and repatriation in eastern Zambia

There is growing recognition within feminist scholarship that managing displacement is a highly contested, politicized, and gendered process. This article seeks to contribute by demonstrating that the processes of resettlement and repatriation (both thought of as ‘solutions’ to displacement) are also contested, politicized, and gendered. My analysis is situated within feminist geopolitics and includes empirical data collected from interviews with and observations of Mozambican/Angolan refugees, their hosts, and institutional actors at Ukwimi Refugee Settlement (URS), Zambia. Specifically, the discussion focuses on two realities. First, that resettlement to formal, organized settlements (like URS) actively displaces gender dynamics, as illustrated by the case of Mozambican refugees resettled to URS. Second, that large-scale, organized repatriation also displaces gender relationships in profound ways, as demonstrated by the large-scale repatriation of Angolan refugees from URS. In the midst of multiple displacements, the daily (and highly gendered) struggles of people at URS reflect the concrete ways in which refugees and their hosts actively seek to emplace themselves at URS.     

To Be or Not to Be a Refugee: The International Politics of the Hong Kong Refugee Crisis, 1949–55

While a great deal is known about the international politics of refugee policy in Europe since the appointment of the first international commissioner for refugees by the League of Nations in 1921, relatively little attention has so far been paid to similar questions involving the plight of refugees in Asia. This article examines one of the first attempts by the newly established UNHCR to extend its mandate beyond the European context for which it was originally conceived. During the early 1950s the British colony of Hong Kong briefly became the focus of intense UN and international attention over the issue of how to treat the hundreds of thousands of Chinese refugees who fled China's communist revolution for the colony. The influx of refugees, many of whom were destitute, threatened to overwhelm Hong Kong's infrastructure and prompted urgent calls for their resettlement abroad. The ensuing UNHCR investigation into the legal status of the Hong Kong ‘refugees’ offers an instructive example of the politicisation of the UNHCR in the context of the unfolding Cold War in Asia and reveals the deep divisions that emerged within the Anglo-American alliance over how to deal with Hong Kong's refugee population. The paper argues that the UNHCR Survey Mission in Hong Kong was doomed to fail given the mutual suspicions and incompatible agendas of the various players involved.     

Violent Inaction: The Necropolitical Experience of Refugees in Europe

A significant outcome of the global crisis for refugees has been the abandonment of forced migrants to live in makeshift camps inside the EU. This paper details how state authorities have prevented refugees from surviving with formal provision, leading directly to thousands having to live in hazardous spaces such as the informal camp in Calais, the site of this study. We then explore the violent consequences of this abandonment. By bringing together thus far poorly integrated literatures on bio/necropolitics (Michel Foucault; Achille Mbembe) and structural violence (Johan Galtung), we retheorize the connections between deliberate political indifference towards refugees and the physiological violence they suffer. In framing the management of refugees as a series of violent inactions, we demonstrate how the biopolitics of migrant control has given way to necropolitical brutality. Advancing geographies of violence and migration, the paper argues that political inaction, as well as action, can be used as a means of control.     

Histories of Migrants and Refugees in Australia

This article canvasses recent scholarship on migrants and refugees in Australian history. It covers broadly three main fields of enquiry: White Australia, postwar immigration and refugees since the Vietnam War. We argue there is a new dynamism to the field while simultaneously making the case that migrant and refugee history has hitherto been largely quarantined from mainstream Australian historiography.     

Uncertainty,exhaustion, and abandonment beyond South/North divides: Governing forced migration through strategic ambiguity

Forced migration studies struggles to counterbalance policy assumptions that the governance of displaced people is of a fundamentally different nature in the Global South and North. This paper contributes to a growing body of critical scholarship that questions the epistemic segregation and theoretical demarcation that reproduce such exceptionalism. It mobilizes the idea of strategic institutional ambiguity to innovatively interrogate routinely assumed differences between migration governance in the Global South and North. It juxtaposes in-depth empirical case-studies of refugee governance in Lebanon, the country with the world's highest per capita number of refugees, with a review of critical research on EUropean governance of forced and irregular migrants. This exploration demonstrates that the rationales and manifestations of the ‘politics of uncertainty’ that refugees are subjected to in Lebanon closely mirror those of the ‘politics of abandonment’ and ‘exhaustion’ that migrants face in EUrope. Under both regimes, strategic forms of ambiguity operate to spatially and temporally marginalize refugees and render them controllable, exploitable, and deportable.     

Jewish Refugees in Cyprus and British Imperial Sovereignty in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1933–1949

This paper focuses on the use of the British Colony of Cyprus as a clearing ground for Jewish refugees on route to Palestine before, during, and after the Second World War. While acknowledging the historiographical consensus underscoring Cyprus’ renewed strategic importance in the context of British post-Second World War imperial retreat in the East, the article argues that Jewish transmigration revealed new potential uses for the island which in turn contributed to confirm British sovereignty in that possession. Drawing on British and Cypriot sources, the article further shows the transformative impact of Jewish transmigration for Cyprus politics as it induced British authorities, who had established an authoritarian regime in the island in the 1930s, to invoke Cypriot reactions in order to stem the flow of refugees to the island. This paved the way for future policies meant to redefine the relations between rulers and ruled. As the management of refugees coming to Cyprus during the period under scrutiny relied on ever more refined instruments of classification, the paper finally highlights the contribution of Empire to the crafting of official categories to designate people on the move—‘refugees’, ‘illegal immigrants’—which still inform European migration policies.     

Refugees in the Arab Middle East: Academic and Policy Perspectives

The field of Refugee Studies is relatively unfamiliar to Middle East area specialists despite the significance of refugees in the region. The strong policy orientation of much of the work in the field has often shaped the way refugee issues are framed by scholars as well as practitioners. Concerns and discourses about refugee‐producing regions in general, and the Arab Middle East in particular, have tended to reflect Western notions of belonging, citizenship, and the state; and in recent years, have been seen through a lens of securitization in the region. This article addresses the development of the field, the subject of displacement and dispossession in the Arab Middle East from a Western perspective, the significant role that Arab cities play as sites for hosting refugees, and the challenges presented by the continued existence of Palestinian refugees.     

“明代遗民”:韩国华人历史探微

论文运用历史研究方法,从倭乱时期的移民和明清交替时期的移民两个方面考察了明代遗民的迁移以及定居过程;分析了明代遗民同时具有对明朝、对韩国、对明代遗民社团的多重认同和形成这种认同的客观条件,并将明代遗民的地位变化过程与韩中关系的变化过程相结合进行探讨。相对于向来以单一民族自居的韩国,朝鲜时期的明代遗民,是对韩国民族的一种学术性挑战,同时明代遗民研究对韩国华侨华人历史研究也是一种新的开拓。     

Care as mundane politics: contested familial refugee lives in Finland

Refugees often find themselves in challenging positions regarding their familial relations while seeking asylum. Whereas transnational human rights agreements and institutions identify families as units of protection and sources of care with variable compositions, many immigration policies and humanitarian practices regard familial relations also problematic and interpret refugees’ rights to family life narrowly. This leaves refugees’ attempts to draw from and manage their transnational family lives poorly recognized and supported. In result, refugees may end up in paradoxical subject positions of having to give up and take responsibility for their families, with their own experiences and understanding of familial life remaining secondary. These contradictions are heightened when familial concerns are among the reasons for seeking asylum, involving caring and uncaring relations. In this article, we analyze familiality as a form of mundane care politics in refugee situations, based on our study with asylum seekers and refugees in Finland.     

The Game: Or, ‘the making of migration’ along the Balkan Route

‘The Game’ is how many refugees describe their attempts to informally travel to Western Europe via the so-called Balkan Route. This article conceptualises The Game as a spatial tactic implemented by refugees as a response to the impossibility of legally entering the EU and as a gray area in the governance of informal migrant mobilities. It does so by engaging with the recent literature on the Balkan Route to analyse how The Game has been performed and ‘managed’ in Serbia, a key ‘buffer state’ along this corridor. Drawing from Tazzioli's work on ‘The Making of Migration’, and in particular on her understanding of refugee forced mobility as a form of ‘migrant management’ on the part of the authorities, this article shows how the ambivalent connotations of The Game reveal the troubling configurations of EU border politics and of its formal and informal geopolitical arrangements. At the same time, it argues that the practices related to The Game ultimately reflect the extraordinary determination of the refugees in creating new itineraries, spatial interstices, invisible networks and ‘holes in the border walls’ that allow them, despite all the difficulties, to challenge such border politics. We conclude by proposing to understand The Game as part of the biopolitics of migration and by suggesting that it represents a powerful manifestation of the condition (and the field of possibility) of thousands of refugees along the Balkan Route today.     

Aus Österreich emigrierte Sozialwissenschaftler. Überblick und Stand der Forschung

The article presents an general view over the enforced migration of Austrian social scientists after 1933. The author argues that the Austrian case is a specific one: first in consequence of the two successive dictatorships, second because of the devastating consequences of the emigration movement for the Austrian scientific community and culture. Only a few of the refugees returned to Austria after 1945. Further could be demonstrated that the Austrian refugees were quickly promoted in the scientific world of their exile countries, by way of comparison — especially in the United States.     

饶家驹与难民区相关问题再探讨

1937年底饶家驹在上海创办了南市难民区,次年又在汉口建立了难民区,为战时难民保护作出了卓越的贡献。本文主要从三个方面论述饶家驹与难民区:一是南市难民区的成立时机。由于饶家驹的努力,南市难民区建立的时间尽可能地提前了。二是南市难民区收容人数。南市难民区最多时收容难民20万以上,在其存在期间大约保护了30万中国难民。三是饶家驹与汉口难民区。饶家驹经过多方奔走成功建立了汉口难民区,但由于日军的蓄意破坏,难民区无法发挥保护难民的作用。     

Refugees and racial capitalism: Meatpacking and the primitive accumulation of labor

When meatpacking plants in the United States lost a third of their undocumented Latinx workers to Federal immigration raids in the late 2000s, the industry began recruiting vulnerable, but “legal,” refugee workers to replace them. In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 threatened to halt meatpacking, two separate executive orders designated meatpacking production as essential to the United States food system and introduced new restrictions on refugee resettlement in the United States. Bridging Marxian literature on race, labor, and capitalism and critical refugee studies, this paper examines the paradox of refugees’ positioning as both “essential” sources of vulnerable labor and “prohibited” threats to the American nation-state. We argue that the placement of refugees in meatpacking jobs is actually the primitive accumulation of unfree labor. In the case of “essential” meatpacking work in the United States, racial capitalism articulates with conditions of statelessness and unequal citizenship rights to anchor “prohibited” refugees to meatpacking work.