Introductory description

Millions of people have historically been forced from their homes by factors including war destruction, political persecution, regime changes, revolutions, or genocide in Europe throughout the twentieth century and in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This has culminated in new understandings of international law and new ways of treating vulnerable populations. The management of various displacement crises has constituted a critical challenge for local populations, state institutions, as well as international and non-governmental organizations in these various contexts. This module explores various case studies as it examines roots of forced displacement crises, the responses to them in diverse reception spaces (e.g. western Europe, eastern Europe, borders and borderlands, urban and rural sites, or refugee camps), and practices to address refugees’ needs in the modern European context (1914-2015). In addition to studying the institutional and structural developments that shaped displacement in and out of Europe, this module will pay a special attention to the human experience of refugeedom.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held and titles may differ.

Week 1: No class
Week 2: Intro + Defining “the refugee.”
Week 3: War Refugees
Week 4: Displacement and Statelessness in the Era of Internationalism
Week 5: State Making, Expulsions, Resettlements
Week 6: Reading Week
Week 7: Refugees of The Spanish Civil War
Week 8: Refugees and Fascism
Week 9: Displaced Persons & WWII
Week 10: The Making of the International Refugee Regime
Week 11: The Expellees
Week 12: Political Refugees in the Early Cold War
Week 13: Refuge in the Socialist East
Week 14: Displacement in the Era of Decolonization
Week 15: PAPER WRITING SESSION
Week 16: Reading Week
Week 17: The Vietnam War and Its Refugees: A shifting paradigm
Week 18: The End of Socialism and the Lure of Democracy
Week 19: The 1990s
Week 20: 2015 and the “Refugee Crisis”

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

•  Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of historical roots and attempted resolutions of various waves of forced displacement in modern Europe.
•  Analyse and evaluate the contributions made by existing multidisciplinary scholarship on history of refugees and forced displacement.
•  Generate ideas through the analysis of a broad range of primary source (visual, textual, oral, data) material for the study of refugees and forced displacement.
•  Take responsibility to identify, design, and produce coherent projects on episodes of history of refugees in modern Europe.

Indicative reading list

Indicative Literature

Rebecca Hamlin, Crossing: How we label and react to people on the move (Stanford University Press, 2021)
Peter Gatrell, “Refugees – What’s Wrong with History?,” Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 30, Issue 2 (2017), 170-189.
Arthur C. Helton, The Price of Indifference: Refugees and Humanitarian Action in the New Century (Oxford University Press, 2002)
Peter Gatrell, “Refugees and Forced Migrants during the First World War,” Immigrants & Minorities, Vol. 26, No.1/2 (2008), 82-110.
Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Peter Gatrell, Free World?: The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956-1963 (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Peter Gatrell, The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent (Basic Books, 2019)
Peter Gatrell, “Putting Refugees in their Place,” New Global Studies, Vol.7, No1 (2013), 1-24.
Keith David Watenpaugh, “Between Communal Survival and National Aspiration: Armenian Genocide Refugees, the League of Nations, and the Practices of Interwar Humanitarianism,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Vol.5, No.2 (2014), 159-181
Doina Anca Cretu, “Child Assistance and the Making of Modern Refugee Camps in Austria-Hungary during the First World War,” Central European History, Vol. 55, Issue 4 (2022), 510-527
Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918-1924 (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
Mira L. Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History (Harvard University Press, 2020)
Matthew Frank & Jessica Reinisch eds., Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959 (Bloomsbury, 2017)
Theodora Dragostinova, “Competing Priorities, Ambiguous Loyalties: Challenges of Socioeconomic Adaptation and National Inclusion of Bulgarian Refugees,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 34, Issue 5 (2006), 549-574
Vilma Hastaoglou-Martinidis and Cristina Palini, “Colonizing New Lands: Rural Settlement of Refugees in Northern Greece (1922-40),” CLARA (2024)
Alicia Munoz Ramirez, “Child Refugees of the Spanish Civil War,” Humanities and Rights Global Network , Vol. 3, Issue 1 (2021), 51-70.
Karl D. Qualls, Stalin’s Ninos: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union (University of Toronto Press, 2021).
Peter Anderson, “The Struggle over the Evacuation to the United Kingdom and Repatriation of Basque Refugee Children: Symbols and Souls
” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 52, Issue 2 (2017), 297-318
Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 1985)
Tara Zahra, The Great Departure (W.W. Norton, 2016)
Marion Kaplan, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (Yale University Press, 2020)
Katarzyna Nowak, “ “ To Reach the Lands of Freedom:” Petitions of Polish Displaced Persons to American Poles, Moral Screening and the Role of Diaspora in Refugee Resettlement,” Cultural and Social History, Vol. 16, Issue 5 (2019), 621-642
Jessica Reinisch, “ “Auntie UNRRA” at the Crossroads,” Past & Present, Vol. 218, Issue (2013), 70-97.
Tara Zahra, “ “The Psychological Marshall Plan:” Displacement, Gender, and Human Rights after World War II,” Central European History, Vol. 44 (2011), 37-62.
Tara Zahra, “ “Prisoners of the Postwar:” Expellees, Displaced Persons, and Jews in Austria after World War II,” Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 41 (2010), 191-215.
Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak, Redrawing nations: ethnic cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944-1948 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001)
Ari Joskowicz, “Romani Refugees and the Postwar Order,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 51, Issue 4 (2016), 760-787
Gerard D. Cohen, In War’s Wake : Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Nikola Tohma and Julia Reinke, “ “Like we would help brothers or sisters?“ Practicing Solidarity with Greek Civil War Refugees in Socialist Czechoslovakia and GDR in the Shadow of World War II,“ International Review of Social History, Vol. 69 (2024), 13-41
Gruia Badescu, “Homelands and dictators: migration, memory, and belonging between Southeastern Europe and Chile,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies (2021), 1-19
Pamela Ballinger, The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy (Cornell University Press, 2020)
Malika Rahal and Benjamin Thomas White, “UNHCR and the Algerian War of Independence: Postcolonial Sovereignty and the Globalization of the International Refugee Regime, 1954-1963,” Journal of Global History, Vol. 17, Issue 2 (2022), 331-352
Itty Abraham, “Contesting the Universality of the refugee Convention: Decolonization and the Additional Protocol,” Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 36, Issue 2 (2023), 195-216
Christina Schwenkel, “Vietnamese in Central Europe: An Unintended Diaspora,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 12, Issue 1 (2017), 1-19
Frank Bösch & Phi Song Hu, “Competing contexts of reception in refugee and immigrant incorporation: Vietnamese in West and East Germany,” Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 47, Issue 21 (2021), 4853-4871
Becky Taylor, “ “Don’t just look for a new pet:”the Vietnamese airlift, child refugees and the dangers of toxic humanitarianism,” Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 52, Issue 2-3 (2018), 195-209
Philipp Ther, The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1492 (Princeton University Press, 2019)
Patrick Major, Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Barbara Franz, “Bosnian refugees and socio-economic realities: Changes in refugee and settlement policies in Austria and the United States,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 29, Issue 1 (2003), 5-25
Dan Stone, “On neighbours and those knocking at the door: Holocaust memory and Europe’s Refugee Crisis,”Patterms of Prejudice, Vol. 52, Issue 2-3 (2018), 231-243
Reece Jones, Violent borders: Refugees and the right to move (Verso Books, 2016)

Indicative List of Primary Sources and Digital Collections

“Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees” (1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees) Link: https://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10
Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” The Menorah Journal, 1943.
Louise W. Holborn, “The League of Nations and the Refugee Problem” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 203 (May 1939), 124-135.
https://www.ushmm.org/collections/the-museums-collections/about/oral-history (Holocaust Oral History)
https://search.archives.un.org/ (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Archives)
https://arolsen-archives.org/en/masonry-grid/post-war-files-show-fates-of-displaced-persons/ (International Refugee Organization Archives)
https://archives.ungeneva.org/refugees-mixed-archival-group-nansen-fonds (Nansen Archives, League of Nations Archives)

Other Literature:

Thea Halo, Not Even my Name: A True Story
Anna Seghers, Transit
Abdularazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives
Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in New Language

Research element

The students will have two assignments that require research:

1. Research paper
2. The development of a podcast series on "Refugees and Memory."

Interdisciplinary

This module includes readings from multiple disciplines (i.e. history, anthropology, sociology, political science). Furthermore, it will speak to multiple specializations (e.g. History & Politics: History & Sociology; Law).

International

The content of this module has a significant international dimension due to the coverage of multiple historical contexts.

Subject specific skills

See Learning Outcomes.

Transferable skills

See Learning Outcomes.