Postcoloniality and Forced Migration

Abstract

World history is peppered with population displacements, forced migrations, and expulsions, and European colonialism was implicated in the forced movement of countless people from the 15th century onwards. The founding of many instruments of international law dealing with forced migration, including the current international refugee regime, were drafted by imperial powers and informed by colonial logics, including ideas of racial hierarchy and civilizational difference. While colonialism may seem, to some, as something of the past, this book argues that colonial logics and assumptions about the world and the various peoples who inhabit it, continues to shape the present in profound ways. This book contributes to an emergent research agenda on postcoloniality and forced migration by bringing forth a thoroughly interdisciplinary collection of chapters dealing with postcolonial contexts from around the world. It explores various histories and geographies of colonial-era forced migration, and the ways in which their legacies continue to shape displacements and our responses to them today. It unsettles presentist and Eurocentric epistemologies, and offers novel insights into the colonial continuities within forced migration governance across the world. In this way, this book urges refugee and forced migration studies, and migration studies more generally, to begin to take seriously the influences of colonialism