Forced Removal Research Articles

Determinants of Enforced Return: A Quantitative Analysis of the Spectrum of (In)voluntariness Among Rejected Asylum Seekers in the Netherlands

ABSTRACTIn recent decades, scholars documented the rise of enforced return in the Global North and scrutinised the vast infrastructure, international diplomacy and in‐country measures that set out to boost these. One such way is by promoting so‐called ‘Assisted Voluntary Returns’: programs in which rejected asylum seekers allegedly have ample opportunity to decide on and effectuate return themselves. This article builds upon scholarly critiques of such programs and aims to destabilise the purported binary between ‘voluntary’ and ‘forced’ return. By comparing predictors for ‘voluntary’ return and forced removal outcomes, we provide empirical evidence for the existence of a ‘spectrum of (in)voluntariness’. Centring our empirical analysis on the Netherlands, we use a unique multilevel dataset with data from various governmental agencies and other sources. Our findings indicate a significant overlap in the policy and non‐policy determinants for both ‘voluntary’ return and forced removal outcomes. Intergovernmental policy determinants only partially explain forced removal outcomes, whereas age, family composition and the situation in migrants' countries of citizenship are of major importance. These findings, therefore, have significant implications for both academic research into enforced return outcomes and for public policy.

Supporting Holistic Health and Gestational Diabetes Mellitus Risk Reduction Among Young Native Females Prior to Pregnancy: A Qualitative Exploration.

AI/AN communities are disproportionately impacted by food insecurity and gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). Decreasing the risk of GDM can interrupt the intergenerational cycle of diabetes in AI/AN families, and can decrease diabetes-related health disparities. The goal of this study was to explore ways of supporting holistic health and reducing the risk of GDM among young American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) females prior to pregnancy. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with adult AI/AN women (>18 years) who had GDM or who have young female relatives (e.g., daughters) (n = 41), AI/AN females between 12 and 24 years (n = 18), and key experts in food/nutrition and health within AI/AN communities (n = 32). Three themes emerged: (1) guidance on how to support young females' holistic wellness; (2) evidence that generations of colonial violence, including forced removal, forced poverty, and the imposition of a Western-based food system, causes deeper, systemic fracturing of traditional cultural food knowledge and practices; and the fact that (3) opportunities for improved adolescent female health are rooted in AI/AN values and how AI/AN people resist the impacts of anti-Indigenous racism through family-based, community-led, and holistic health. These themes suggest alternative understandings about the relationships between food insecurity and holistic pre-pregnancy health and can guide our next steps in decreasing health disparities in these communities.

The Return of the Repressed: Political Deportation in the 
Indian Ocean during the Age 
of Revolutions

Abstract Between the second half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Indian Ocean became a theatre of the global war waged by European imperial states. This article compares how three colonial powers, in French, Danish, and British colonial territories, dealt with interconnected political threats, in a region where the limits of imperial sovereignty and jurisdictions were often blurred and frequently renegotiated. Rather than a formally sanctioned doctrine and legal category, deportation should be understood as a crude tool for solving a variety of problems. Although the forced removal of criminals, religious minorities or political opponents was not a new instrument to the late eighteenth century, it is often ignored that political deportation was also a widely used legal practice in the Indian Ocean during the ‘age of revolutions’. In this region, deportation was used by imperial centres to get rid of political enemies, but also by regional authorities, without referring to metropolitan orders. It was usually not a judicial punishment, but an administrative measure justified in the name of political necessity. This article focuses on three small colonial enclaves, French Reunion, Danish Tranquebar, and British Pondicherry, where a siege mentality and fear of political sedition were omnipresent in this period. Contemporaries believed, with some justifications, that a single conspiracy linked these three colonial theatres, involving the same set of protagonists, who redeployed their projects as they were removed from one place to the next. But in these three sites and societies, deportation raises different issues. Dumping radicals on a foreign shore might have been a short-term fix, but it rarely solved problems in the long term: deportees often returned after some time, which was a direct consequence of the colonial authorities’ reluctance to take irreparable decisions, and of the entanglement of empires and polities in the Indian Ocean.

Rail relations: Aboriginal storywork and remaking Australia’s settler‐colonial infrastructure

AbstractAustralian railway histories are dominated by narratives of engineering triumphs, colonial expansion into empty land, and bringing civilisation and development through railway infrastructure. These settler‐colonial stories can be read back on themselves as histories and geographies of Aboriginal dispossession and colonial possession. Indeed, Aboriginal people, lands, waterways, and cultures have always been implicated in railway infrastructures, willingly or not. Aboriginal people’s entanglements with the New South Wales railways, to which we refer as “rail relations,” have involved dispossession, removal, employment, mobility, and travel, including the forced removal of children known as the Stolen Generations. These are relations of harm, loss, and grief but also of pride, connectivity, and survival. We argue in this paper that when Aboriginal communities engage in storying the New South Wales railways as Aboriginal they reassemble this infrastructure otherwise: not just as a tool of dispossession but also as life affirming. Indigenous storytelling can therefore overcome settler colonial erasure and the oversimplification of railway infrastructure hi/stories. Research about how Aboriginal lives have been interconnected with railways expansion and development is limited. While Aboriginal railway stories are continuously told within communities, they remain almost entirely silenced elsewhere. Overcoming the invisibility of Aboriginal rail relations is crucial as both truth‐telling of the past and to ensure more just infrastructural outcomes now and in the future.

Lithuanian laborers in Nazi-occupied Austria 1942–1945

The theme of forced and voluntary labor of Lithuanians in Nazi Germany has been nearly forgotten and not studied by Lithuanian historians in recent decades. Even less examined has been the forced labor and imprisonment of Lithuanians in Nazi-annexed Austria. Up to 70,000 Lithuanians could have been deported to Germany during World War II. This is a fairly significant part of the Lithuanian population, which has affected Lithuanian Poles, Roma and minority Lithuanians most severely. When assessing the types and scale of Nazi violence, apart from the genocide of the Jews, the conclusion is that it affected people in Lithuania most who suffered from forced labor and forced removal from residential areas. At the current stage of research, we can predict that at least a thousand Lithuanians, forcibly or voluntarily, ended up in Nazi-annexed Austria during World War II. The national composition was made up predominantly of Lithuanians, Poles and Russians. Lithuanians were transported to Austria en masse from 1942 to almost until the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. The vast majority of Lithuanians brought to Austria worked in industrial and transport companies. The overview of the workplaces shows that the majority of the Lithuanians was concentrated in Vienna, Kapfenberg and Marktle. A smaller number of Lithuanians were employed by farmers in the villages. Part of the Lithuanian population came to Austria as political prisoners or for racial reasons (Jews). Another part was imprisoned while staying in Austria for disciplinary violations or attempts to flee to Lithuania. The imprisoned residents of Lithuania were mainly held in the Mauthauzen concentration camp and its branches (Guzen, etc.). At the current stage of research, it can be predicted that at least one hundred inhabitants of Lithuania of different nationalities were imprisoned in the Mauthauzen concentration camp. The revised List of 68 Lithuanians who died in Mauthauzen concentration camp (some persons may be Latvian residents) listed below in appendix 1 (list clarified by LGGRTC employee Stanislovas Buchaveckas).

The State, Religion, and Violence in Colonial and Postcolonial Malawi

In the histories of both colonial and postcolonial Malawi, there have been cases of religious-related violence, both in its physical and non-physical forms. Such cases have led to the deaths of the “perpetrators” of violence and ‘innocent’ believers, destruction of property, prison detentions, and even the forced removal of citizens from the country. This paper analyzes two case studies, one in which private citizens perpetrated the violence, led by a preacher called John Chilembwe, of the Providence Industrial Mission (PIM), challenging British colonial authorities during the second decade of the twentieth century. In the second case, the focus is on the independent Malawi government, which used violence against members of the Jehovah’s Witness (JW) religious sect from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, owing to the Witnesses’ disassociation from the demands of the secular state. Using data primarily drawn from various archives and other published studies, this paper argues that the use of ‘religious-based violence’ is not just a domain ‘reserved’ for those experiencing oppression, exclusion, and marginalization. Rather, authoritarian governments, like the one that emerged in postcolonial Malawi and other parts of Africa, also resorted to using ‘religious-based violence’ to serve as a tool for eliminating ‘non-conforming’ religious sects and organizations. In doing so, this paper contributes to the various fields of scholarship, including the relationship between religion and violence in modern Africa and the dynamics and operations of the state in both colonial and postcolonial Africa.

Demystifying oral history with natural language processing and data analytics: a case study of the Densho digital collection

PurposeThis study aims to explore the applications of natural language processing (NLP) and data analytics in understanding large-scale digital collections in oral history archives.Design/methodology/approachNLP and data analytics were used to analyse the oral interview transcripts of 904 survivors of the Japanese American incarceration camps collected from Densho Digital Repository, relying specifically on descriptive analysis, keyword extraction, topic modelling and sentiment analysis (SA).FindingsThe researchers found multiple geographic areas of large residential communities of ethnic Japanese people and the place names of the concentration camps. The keywords and topics extracted reflect the deplorable conditions and militaristic nature of the camps and the forced labour of the internees. When remembering history, the main focus for the narrators remains the redress and reparation movement to obtain the restitution of their civil rights. SA further found that the forcible removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during Second World War negatively impacted and brought deep trauma to the narrators.Originality/valueThis case study demonstrated how NLP and data analytics could be applied to analyse oral history archives and open avenues for discovery. Archival researchers and the general public may benefit from this type of analysis in making connections between temporal, spatial and emotional elements, which will contribute to a holistic understanding of individuals and communities in terms of their collective memory.

The importance of 'place' and its influence on rural and remote health and well-being in Australia.

This article explores the crucial role of 'place' as an ecological, social and cultural determinant of health and well-being, with a focus on the benefits and challenges of living rurally and remotely in Australia. The health system, including health promotion, can contribute actively to creating supportive environments and places that foster health and well-being among individuals residing in rural and remote locations. For First Nations peoples, living on Country, and caring for Country and its people, are core to Indigenous worldviews, and the promotion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and well-being. Their forced removal from ancestral lands has been catastrophic. For all people, living in rural and remote areas can deliver an abundance of the elements that contribute to a 'liveable' community, including access to fresh air, green and blue space, agricultural employment, tight-knit communities, a sense of belonging and identity, and social capital. However, living remotely also can limit access to employment opportunities, clean water, affordable food, reliable transport, social infrastructure, social networks and preventive health services. 'Place' is a critical enabler of maintaining a healthy life. However, current trends have led to a reduction in local services and resources, and increased exposure to the impacts of climate change. This commentary suggests ideas and strategies through which people in rural and remote locations can strengthen the liveability, resilience and identity of their communities, and regain access to essential health care and health promotion services and resources. Recommended strategies include online access to education, employment and telehealth; flexible provision of social infrastructure; and meaningful and responsive university-health service partnerships.

Shifting Attitudes of Acehnese towards Rohingya Refugees

Various rejections by local Acehnese, as well as netizens on social media, have emerged against the newly arrived Rohingya refugees on the beaches of Aceh. The rejection ranges from the locals' rejection of the boats to land to the forced removal of the refugees by students. This change in response from the local Acehnese community is surprising, as the local community's response to the refugees has been known to be positive since the first boat arrived. Through a qualitative analysis that connects the issue with the concept of autochthony, this research found that such concept is connected to the shifting response of the Acehnese towards the newly arrived Rohingya refugees, whereas the concept’s key points of (1) protection of ancestral heritage as well as (2) fear of being contaminated by foreign influences, are prevalent in the locals’ recent gestures and acts of refusals. If this attitude is maintained, it is not impossible that more discrimination towards the Rohingya refugees could take place in the near future.

Sport, Identity, and Self‐Determination: Aboriginal Rugby League in Brisbane after the Second World War

This paper investigates the relationship between self‐determination and sport through the exploits of the Brisbane All Blacks, an Aboriginal rugby league football club established in Brisbane after the Second World War. When the club was formed, the government policy of “Protection,” which legalised the forced removal of Aboriginal peoples to government settlements, was giving way in Queensland to the policy of assimilation. Aboriginal people in Brisbane, including members of the Brisbane All Blacks, were expected to renounce their Aboriginality under the assimilation policy and culturally absorb into white society. Oral history and archival research show, however, that the Brisbane All Blacks actively pushed back against these expectations. The footballers strategically navigated their settler colonial environment in ways that allowed them to exploit the assimilation policy for their own needs and purposes. The All Blacks' football activities and associated Boathouse dances facilitated the emergence of a distinctly Aboriginal community in Southeast Queensland. This community demonstrated a sense of pride and empowerment, as well as forging strong social networks, which enabled Aboriginal initiatives in the following decades. The All Blacks are a meaningful example of self‐determination by Aboriginal peoples before formal self‐determination emerged federally on the political landscape or internationally at the United Nations.

They put me on a train: Assimilation and the Australian railways

AbstractThis article explores the involvement of the Australian railways in the forcible removal of Aboriginal children. Focusing on the visions and voices of Aboriginal peoples who were taken away from their families by train, the article considers how railways were used in the attempted assimilation of First Nations peoples into White society. The last train ride, an artwork by South Australian Yankunytjatjara artist and Stolen Generations survivor Kunyi McInerney, serves as a point of departure to study how the settler colonial infrastructure of rail operationalised the Australian government policies of assimilation. I ask how railway infrastructures have affected Aboriginal peoples and how Aboriginal peoples have responded to railway infrastructures. In centring the artworks and narratives of Aboriginal people taken away by train, I extend an invitation to readers to rethink geography through the visual expressions and stories of First Nations peoples. Close attention to the perspectives of affected peoples opens possibilities to view infrastructures in a different light. The visions and voices of Aboriginal families impacted by assimilation policies show that the railways played a pivotal role in the separation of Aboriginal children from families and that railway infrastructures have also been sites of resistance to and subversion of assimilation and child removal. Paying careful attention to First Nations voices and visions, the article informs how the Australian railways have been complicit in assimilation policies and how Aboriginal peoples have used the railways to resist and survive such settler colonial projects.

Blasted, Bound, and Bald: the Abject Properties of Witch Hair

The witch’s blasted hair in Early Modern visual culture is moving and evolving. Her hair is untamable, animated by a wind and a force unknowable to the viewer. The artists who captured this “blasted” hair in the 16th century, including Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Sebald Beham, and Albrecht Dürer, found themselves working in opposition to what appears, at first glance, a formidable “other:” women’s agency and sexuality, frozen in bodily form as strands of hair. Little research has been dedicated to an earnest analysis of the witch’s amorphous hair so this paper consists primarily of original research and the application of philosophical and anthropological theory. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection is a key tenet of this paper’s central argument. The witch is not an “other” directly opposed to a mainstream, she is a third intermediary thing: Kristeva’s “abject.” She is a personification of the skin on the surface of sour milk, instilling disgust in the potential consumer. She is the abject precisely because she is embedded in the object; her hair is the most explicit vehicle for this argument. Friedrich Speevon Langenfield’s accounts of forced hair removal and contemporary literature from Raymond Firth, Barbara Baert, and E.R. Leach inform this reading of witch hair as the abject. This paper concludes that the visual translation of blasted hair is an attempt to remove it and its female sexual connotation from the imagination to a more accessible visual medium. The artist’s renderings are meant to turn the abject into an easily digestible object, a complete “other.”

I Lost My Muslim Identity: A Study of Indonesian Muslim Women Workers in Japan

This research reviews how Japan has become an attractive destination for migrant workers and international tourists in Asia, especially those from Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. This research aimed to explore how Indonesian female nurses maintain their religious and cultural identity a midst these challenges. The growth of migrant workers from Southeast Asia to Japan began in the 1950s after Japan joined the Colombo Plan, and accelerated following revisions to immigration control laws in the 1980s. The government-to-government (G to G) internship program has also been implemented since 1990, with Indonesian participation since 1993. Even though industry is the backbone of the Japanese economy, the population of productive human resources has experienced a significant decline, which has an impact on industrial productivity. This research used a qualitative research approach based on understanding social realities formed through the context, culture, and subjective meanings held by the informants through their experiences during migration in Japan. To overcome this, the Japanese government has taken steps to open its doors to foreign workers, including from Indonesia. Indonesia is one of the largest suppliers of migrant workers for Japan, with various types of visas such as Technical Intern Training (TITP), Specified Skilled Worker (SSW), and others. However, nursing work is often socially associated with women. In Japan, Indonesian female nurses face complex challenges, including losing their Muslim identity. Revealing uniforms and external factors such as negative stereotypes, discrimination and forced removal of the hijab complicate the situation.

Where our identity lies: Confirmation of Aboriginality—narratives of colonial and lateral violence

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are facing growing levels of scrutiny to prove their identity to access Indigenous-specific government services designed to mitigate the impacts of past government policies. Yet, it is those who have been most severely impacted by past government policies of forcible removal from Country and separation of families who often face challenges obtaining evidence to prove their Indigeneity. Employing narrative inquiry and collaborative autoethnography, this article draws on the personal reflections and experiences of the Aboriginal authors to explore the health and wellbeing impacts of deficit discourses, perceptions, and judgements about Indigeneity in Australia. Our personal stories are shared to enliven discussion on how proof of Indigeneity requirements may systemically compound ongoing intergenerational trauma. These stories and perspectives are shared to stimulate review of proof of Indigeneity policies and procedures by government agencies and education institutions across Australia.

Self-Determination, Public Accountability, and Rituals of Reform in First Peoples Child Welfare

First Peoples continue to face intergenerational harms as a result of settler systems of intervention in the lives of their families, including the forced removal of children. First Peoples resistance includes advocacy for systemic change, in particular, focused on foundations of greater accountability in child welfare systems, and recognition of First Peoples’ right to self-determination. However, achieving these necessary structural changes remains a pressing challenge. Using the example of the recent Aboriginal-led review of child welfare in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, ‘Family is Culture’, this paper explores the cycle of inquiry and response, and the repeated failures to enable self-determination or strengthen public accountability and oversight. Drawing on concepts including legitimacy and the rule of law, we conceptualise this pattern of reviews as a ritual of redemption by settler child – welfare systems, distancing themselves from ‘past’ wrongs while refusing to address the harmful foundations of these systems, thereby perpetuating the violence imposed on First Peoples children, families and communities. This contrasts with First Peoples’ frameworks for child welfare reform, which must be urgently realised in order to establish such systems on more just and effective foundations.

Depicting areas of indigenous Australian women’s subjugation under imperialism: An indigenous feminist study of Jack Davis's No Sugar and Eva Johnson's Murras

This study aims to examine the portrayal of the oppression of Indigenous women in post-colonial drama focusing on themes of sexual violence, enforced sterilization and the Stolen Generation as depicted in Davis's No Sugar and Johnson's Murras. A qualitative analysis of these plays reveals the intertwining of sexual exploitation with colonial and imperial conquest. Rape and sexual abuse of Indigenous women are seen as metaphors for land exploitation and political subjugation. The findings of the study indicate a systemic violation of Indigenous women's rights. Indigenous women are sexually assaulted in both Murras and No Sugar which demonstrates imperialist control over their bodies. Another theme that develops is forced sterilization as shown in Murras in which indigenous young women are made sterile without their consent, symbolising a greater assault on aboriginal culture. The trauma of the Stolen Generation is outlined in both plays depicting the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families, severing cultural and familial bonds and originating a generational identity crisis. The preservation of Indigenous identity through women’s stories and traditional practices emerges as a significant aspect of resistance against colonial oppression. The selected plays underscore the role of Indigenous women in sustaining and transmitting cultural narratives and practices which is essential for preserving Indigenous identity and spirit. The findings of the research need a more in-depth understanding of the historical and ongoing oppression of indigenous women as well as a need for reparative justice.

The role of aquaculture in the international trade of giant clams (Tridacninae) for the aquarium industry (2001–2019)

The role of aquaculture in the international trade of giant clams (Tridacninae) for the aquarium industry (2001–2019)

Insecurity, deportability and authority

Security is more than ever a central theme in the study of international migration. For the past twenty years, research on the securitization of migration has burgeoned. While these initiatives are to be applauded, we believe they may also have misdiagnosed the problem. For example, it may not be that the concept of ‘security’ needs to be ‘humanized’ in order to be more in tune with migrants’ concerns. Rather, the problem may lie in the use of the ‘migrant’ as an analytical category. The ‘migrant’ remains an inherently statist construct. The starting premise for the collection of articles in this special issue is that it is the tendency of academic research to mistake the statist category of the ‘migrant’ as an analytical category that has prevented the literature on the migration–security nexus from meaningfully reflecting the lived experience and aspirations of its human respondents, particularly as regards their encounters with forms of institutional authority, practices, resistance and resilience. We use the rubric of deportability to open up a variety of ways of thinking and talking about migration and security that do not fall back upon statist tropes. The authors in this collection take up this challenge by framing and employing concepts such as statelessness, sedentariness and expulsion to redefine our understanding of the relationship between movement and order. They take inspiration from multiple brands of social and political theorizing where conditions of violence and forced removal qualitatively differentiate the experiences and encounters of a particular group.

International standards and domestic legislation on human organ donation and transplantation

The article analyzes international standards for the quality and safety of organs for transplantation. Azerbaijan, like other countries, strictly prohibits organ trade. It criminalized the forcible removal of organs, fraud or coercion, and the buying or selling of organs. The objective of the work is to analyze the Oviedo Convention and the Council of Europe Convention on Combating Trafficking in Human Organs, as well as other legal acts, in comparison with the criminal and administrative laws of Azerbaijan. To achieve the objectives of the research, the author of the article used such methods as analysis and synthesis, the formal-legal method and the comparative-legal method. As a result of the research carried out, it was concluded that Azerbaijan should improve its relevant legislation taking into account the norms of these conventions. In particular, the State's priority should be to emphasize the donation of artificial organs and tissues instead of human donation.

Changing the working conditions of the mineral wool cupola during the transition from an open type to a closed one

The widespread use in the industry of mine furnaces of the wagon type requires the organization of management of their gasdynamic and thermal regime. In the mode of operation of a cupola with an open grate, its thermal mode is characterized mainly by the peripheral movement of gases with a significant difference in the ratio of heat capacities of gas flows and materials. The use of forced removal of exhaust gases from the shaft furnace contributes to an earlier transition from a peripheral to a predominantly central movement mechanism. By increasing the degree of rarefaction on the grate to 0,71‒0,73 bar, it is possible to increase the level of melt temperature, temperature pressure and air blast flow, exhaust gas temperature while improving the conditions of heat exchange between gases and heated materials. This process will be accompanied by a continuous decrease in the productivity of the unit with an improvement in the stability of the melting process. A further increase in the level of rarefaction on the grate contributes to the gradual transition of the mechanism of movement of gases from the peripheral to the central one with a deterioration in the parameters of the wagon melting.