History Of Refugees Research Articles

German Refugee Historians and Friedrich Meinecke: Letters and Documents, 1910–1977. By Gerhard A. Ritter. Translated by Alex Skinner. Studies in Central European Histories, volume 49. Edited by Thomas A. Brady Jr. and Roger Chickering. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Pp. xiii+554. $183.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsGerman Refugee Historians and Friedrich Meinecke: Letters and Documents, 1910–1977. By Gerhard A. Ritter. Translated by Alex Skinner. Studies in Central European Histories, volume 49. Edited by Thomas A. Brady Jr. and Roger Chickering. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Pp. xiii+554. $183.00.Stefan BergerStefan BergerUniversity of Bochum Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 84, Number 2June 2012The Jew in the Modern European Imaginary Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/664637 Views: 10Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Safe Haven? A History of Refugees in America. By David W. Haines.

Safe Haven? A History of Refugees in America. By David W. Haines.

Safe haven?: a history of refugees in America

The notion of America as land of refuge is vital to American civic consciousness yet over the past seventy years the country has had a complicated and sometimes fickle relationship with its refugee populations. Attitudes and policies toward refugees from the government, voluntary organizations, and the general public have ranged from acceptance to rejection; from well-wrought program efforts to botched ones. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary and historical material, and based on the author's three-decade experience in refugee research and policy, Safe Haven? provides an integrated portrait of this crucial component of American immigration-and of American engagement with the world. Covering seven decades of immigration history, Haines shows how refugees, their supporters and detractors continue to struggle with national identities and the effect this struggle has had on American institutions and attitudes.|The notion of America as land of refuge is vital to American civic consciousness yet over the past seventy years the country has had a complicated and sometimes fickle relationship with its refugee populations. Attitudes and policies toward refugees from the government, voluntary organizations, and the general public have ranged from acceptance to rejection; from well-wrought program efforts to botched ones. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary and historical material, and based on the author's three-decade experience in refugee research and policy, Safe Haven? provides an integrated portrait of this crucial component of American immigration-and of American engagement with the world. Covering seven decades of immigration history, Haines shows how refugees, their supporters and detractors continue to struggle with national identities and the effect this struggle has had on American institutions and attitudes.

Wounded Memory of Hazara Refugees from Afghanistan Remembering and Forgetting Persecution

This article explores oral histories of Hazara refugees who fled to Australia and the significance of subjectivity when using memory as a historical source. In forming modern Afghanistan, Hazaras were brutally subjugated and continue to suffer persecution a century later. Ricoeur argues that a nation’s founding violence creates ‘wounded memory’, in which past grievances dominate, while other experiences are forgotten. Through interdisciplinary analysis, the tensions between remembering and forgetting within the Hazaras narratives reveal both the effects of trauma and their assertion of agency, and highlight the complex interplay between history, memories of suffering, and the present.This article has been peer-reviewed.

The League of Nations' Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927

The essay centers of the efforts by the League of Nations to rescue women and children survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. This rescue -- a seemingly unambiguous good -- was at once a constitutive act in drawing the boundaries of the international community, a key moment in the definition of humanitarianism, and a site of resistance to the colonial presence in the post-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. Drawing from a wide range of source materials in a number of languages, including Turkish, Armenian, and Arabic, the essay brings the intellectual and social context of humanitarianism in initiating societies together with the lived experience of humanitarianism in the places where the act took form. In so doing, it draws our attention to the proper place of the Eastern mediterranean, and its women and children, in the global history of humanitarianism. The prevailing narrative of the history of human rights places much of its emphasis on the post-World War II era, the international reaction to the Holocaust, and the founding of the United Nations. yet contemporary human rights thinking also took place within practices of humanitarianism in the interwar period, and is necessarily inseparable from the histories of refugees, colonialism, and the non-West.

The Future for Palestinian Refugees (review)

Future for Palestinian Refugees, by Michael Dumper. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 2007. 233 pp. $55.00. This book explores solutions for Palestinian refugees. It claims that the study is an argument against exceptionalism of Palestinian-Israeli case, suggesting that measures diat have been used elsewhere can be used to help solve this issue (p. 3). There are chapters on causes of problem; international practice; options of local integration, resettlement and repatriation; role of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA); reparations; truth, justice, and reconciliation. book contains a wealth of information and commentary, three maps, and seven statistical tables. Dumper suggests diat die root of die problem is die Palestinian claim for justice or completeness as he calls it and die Israeli claim for an exclusively Jewish state. Jewish demand is not mirror image of Palestinian one because Palestinians are not seeking an exclusively Arab, or Muslim and Christian stare (p. 5). This assertion is over-simplistic to die point of being untrue. Hamas, which won die last Palestinian elections, does seek an Arab or Muslim state and does not accept that Jews have any rights in Middle East. Other Palestinians, including Fatah, have conditionally accepted Israel's right to exist but only in recent years after nearly one hundred years of conflict. Dumpers history of conflict is inaccurate and biased. He states that Balfour declaration was issued by British prime minister; in fact it was issued by British foreign secretary (p. 23). He claims that UN General Assembly decision of November 1947 to partition was the catalyst for a civil war in Palestine without mentioning Jewish acceptance of resolution and Arab rejection. He makes no mention of Peel Commissions Report of 1937 that was also rejected by Arabs and accepted by Jews as a basis for discussion. Blame is nearly always placed on one side. One clear example is this: The radical Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) was elected as new PNA government on a platform that does not recognize Israel or any of agreements signed hitherto. refusal of Israel or Quartet (emphasis added) to countenance any dealings with new government has caused a crisis in peace process and possibly its temporary demise (p. 34). Hamas does not concern itself with refugee issues: it demands Islamic justice which precludes any Jewish presence in what it considers to be Muslim land. Yasser Arafat often emphasized Islamic motifs and de-emphasized refugee issues that were much closer to Abu Mazan's heart. Dumpers treatment of role of United Nations is uncritical. Hence he states that UNRWA, which deals with Palestinian Refugees, was not involved in permanent solutions while United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which works in other parts of world, is involved in trying to find permanent solutions. This is a crucial issue that has played a major if not major role in history of refugees, but Dumper has nothing to say about why such a distinction was made in functioning of these two UN refugee bodies and what implications have been. …

DISPLACED HISTORIANS, DIALECTICAL HISTORIES

For German‐Jewish refugees, the Holocaust and its aftermath produced extremely difficult questions of identity and memory. The considerable literature on German‐Jewish émigré historians has rarely addressed scholars’ efforts to confront such questions, and has particularly neglected the important role of second‐generation refugee historians. This article examines the connection between the experiences, memories and scholarship of two leading second‐generation emigrant historians: George L. Mosse and Peter Gay. As children, Mosse and Gay lived the Goethian Germany of Bildung, and then fled as the same Germany produced the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Each went on to write important work on the life and death of the modern German‐Jewish community. This article contends that Mosse and Gay thus shared a unique combination of intimacy and distance regarding German and German‐Jewish history. Such a combination and a correspondent status of insider‐outsider made Mosse’s and Gay’s lives and perspectives paradigmatic of the dialectical paths of Germany in the twentieth century.

Building on the Strengths of a Cambodian Refugee Community Through Community-Based Outreach

Literature and practice are limited on strategies to reach elder Southeast Asian refugees by using their strengths and resilience. This article presents the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded Cambodian Community Health 2010 Program in Lowell, Massachusetts, as a case example and provides refugee history, project background, community survey results about strengths and risks, literature on strengths-based approaches, outreach activities, and evaluation. The focus is elimination of health disparities in cardiovascular disease and diabetes. "Community conversations" and a daylong forum with community leaders were used to develop plans for outreach. A Cambodian Elders Council provided information and guidance used to refine the program. Key findings highlight involving elders in organizing events, avoiding reliance on literacy, integrating health promotion with socialization, using ties with Buddhist temples, developing transportation alternatives, and utilizing local Khmer-language media. Implications include applicability to other refugee communities with low literacy, high levels of trauma, limited English, and strong religious involvement.

Afghan Refugees in Pakistan: Not All Refugees, Not Always in Pakistan, Not Necessarily Afghan?

In 2001 there were estimated to be two million Afghan refugees in Pakistan. In the past six years however over 3.5 million refugees have returned and recent census data show that nearly 2.5 million still remain in Pakistan. Three straightforward explanations for this monumental discrepancy have been posited: Afghans high birthrates their history of cross-border migration and increasing levels of urbanization in Pakistan. Yet the fact that none of these processes comes as a surprise to researchers familiar with the history of Afghan refugees begs a still deeper question: how and why were these processes so utterly overlooked in 2001? The answer it is argued is a fundamental confusion not only in how we count refugees but in how we conceptualize them. The dichotomous distinction between refugees and non-refugees while possessing a certain legal clarity does a poor job of describing the reality of individuals whose movements are influenced by numerous social political and economic factors. (authors)

Population displacement in the baltic region in the twentieth century: from ‘refugee studies’ to refugee history

This article explores how Baltic migration, and particularly the experience of forced migration, relates to broader comparative and methodological issues and debates in the emerging field of refugee history. Attention is given to the impact of two world wars and their aftermath in the Baltic, with particular emphasis on the ways in which refugees from the Baltic and elsewhere have related their experiences. The article concludes by drawing attention to the multiple readings of population displacement that historians need to entertain.

Landscape of hope and despair: Palestinian refugee camps

Nearly half of the world's eight million Palestinians are registered refugees, having faced partition and exile. Landscape of Hope and Despair examines this refugee experience in Lebanon through the medium of spatial practices and identity, set against the backdrop of prolonged violence. Julie Peteet explores how Palestinians have dealt with their experience as refugees by focusing attention on how a distinctive Palestinian identity has emerged from and been informed by fifty years of refugee history. Concentrating ethnographic scrutiny on a site-specific experience allows the author to shed light on the mutually constitutive character of place and cultural identification. Palestinian refugee camps are contradictory places: sites of grim despair but also of hope and creativity. Within these cramped spaces, refugees have crafted new worlds of meaning and visions of the possible in politics. In the process, their historical predicament was a point of departure for social action and thus became radically transformed. Beginning with the calamity of 1948, Landscape of Hope and Despair traces the dialectic of place and cultural identification through the initial despair of the 1950s and early 1960s to the tumultuous days of the resistance and the violence of the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath. Most significantly, this study invokes space, place, and identity to construct an alternative to the received national narratives of Palestinian society and history. The moving stories told here form a larger picture of these refugees as a people struggling to recreate their sense of place and identity and add meaning to their surroundings through the use of culture and memory.

Exile and Acculturation: Refugee Historians since the Second World War

Beneficial tended. Within the domain of historical writing, both exist. A famous example of intended historiographical contact was the arrival of the German historian Ludwig Riess (1861-1928), a student of Leopold von Ranke, in Japan. On the recommendation of the director of the bureau of historiography, Shigeno Yasutsugu, Riess began to lecture at the Imperial University (renamed Tokyo Imperial University in 1897) in 1887. He spoke about the Rankean method with its emphasis on facts and critical, documentand evidence-based history. At his suggestion, Shigeno founded the Historical Society of Japan and the Journal of Historical Scholarship. Riess influenced an entire generation of Japanese historians, including Shigeno himself and Kume Kunitake, then well known for their demystification of entire areas of Japanese history.1 However, this famous case of planned acculturation has less well-known aspects. First, Riess, who was a Jew and originally a specialist in English history, went to Japan, among other reasons, possibly on account of the anti-Semitism and Anglophobia characteristic of large parts of the German academy at the time. Only in 1902 did he return from Japan to become an associate professor at the University of Berlin.2 Second, Riess and other German historians (such as Ernst Bernheim, whose Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie, published in 1889, was popular in Japan) were influential only because Japanese historical methodology focused before their arrival on the explication of documents.3 Riess's legacy had unexpected

"Traveling pains": embodied metaphors of suffering among Southern Sudanese refugees in Cairo.

This paper presents the results of a larger study conducted among Southern Sudanese refugees in Cairo, Egypt. "Illness talk" and body metaphors are the focus of the present work, which is based mainly on an analysis of the illness narratives of people attending a church-run medical clinic. The findings suggest that refugees use certain narrative styles in discussing their illnesses that highlight the interconnection of bodily ills and refugee-related trauma. The refugees narrated the histories of their illnesses in terms consistent and coterminous with their refugee histories, and articulated illness causes in terms of threatening assaults on their sense of self as human beings and as part of a distinct community and culture. The use of embodied metaphors to understand and cope with their current and past traumatic experiences was echoed in narratives that were nonillness related. Metaphors such as "the heart," "blood," and "body constriction" were consistently used to discuss social and cultural losses. Understanding the role that the body plays in experience and communication within a given cultural context is crucial for physicians and others assisting refugees.

Национальная Репрезентация и Социальные Категории: Пример Политических Беженцев

SUMMARY: The author explores the sociological category of representation, especially as it is visible in national representation and in connection with the history of political refugees. Representation in the modern state, according to the author, acquires a multidimensional character of group mobilization and categorization from above by government authorities. During the July Monarchy in France, the state was thought to be separate from the social sphere and was not interested in defining who was a foreigner and stringently separating them from citizens. According to the law of 1832, only those refugees who were assisted by the state economically were specifically defined as foreigners and proof had to be presented that they were “real” refugees. Social support provided to refugees led to their categorization as such. In post-World War II Europe, refugee became a juridical category defined by international conventions. This universal definition was in conflict with the institutionalized “sovereign people” and its system of social welfare. Using regimes of identification and limiting national welfare programs, modern national states also limit the definition of “refugee” at will. As a result, refugees constitute a social category because they do not participate in the social work that leads to their constitution as a group. They remain, essentially, an object of government policies.

'Putting Yourself in Other People's Shoes': The use of Forum theatre to explore refugee and homeless issues in schools

This study investigated the experiences of, and interactions between, participants of a Forum theatre workshop, which addressed the issue of the refugee child at school. Staged by a UK theatre company, whose actors had, in their own lives, experienced being homeless and/or refugees, the workshop was investigated as it was performed in three London secondary state schools. Findings revealed that the workshop was highly relevant to the students, reflecting moral dilemmas which they faced in their everyday lives, as they encountered refugee students at school. This interactive workshop gave them the opportunity to try out moral behaviour, which could potentially be applied to real-life situations. Students felt that the workshop enabled them to put themselves "in other people's shoes", both the fictional characters in the workshop as well as actual people they knew at school. The homeless and refugee histories of the actors themselves intensified the reality of the workshop experience. The Forum theatre workshop aimed to encourage the students to become moral agents in their own lives. However, its ability to do this was limited by the lack of both moral reflection upon the issues raised, and guidance in appropriate moral action following the workshop. This absence of follow-up relates to the fact that the workshop was perceived by teachers as a drama activity, and no attempts were made to address its moral content which, teachers felt, belonged to the domain of the Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) in the National Curriculum for England.

Out of the Third Reich: Refugee Historians in Post-War Britain

Journey to the centre of the periphery, Julius Carlebach from revolutionary socialism to German history, Francis L. Carsten recovering from culture shock, Edgar J. Feuchtwanger from gardener to professor, J.A.S. Grenville myself as historian, E.P. Hennock fragments of an unwritten biography, Helmut Koenigsberger a slow awakening, Wolf Mendl self-discovery - an European historian, Werner E. Mosse the scholar as businessman, Helmut Pappe Mommsenstrasse to Devonshire Street, Arnold Paucker in search of a social purpose, sidney Pollard from Danube to Isis - a career in two cultures, Peter Pulzer Germany, Italy, and England, Nicholai Rubinstein a tale of two cultures, Walter Ullmann.

Mosse's Recasting of European Intellectual and Cultural History

George Mosse wrote European intellectual and cultural history in a way that recast its meaning. Because he did so without a specific theoretical program, the extent of his accomplishment in this regard at times went unnoticed. He was a member of the remarkable generation of European refugee historians who together formed the core of the American study of European culture and ideas in the postwar era. For his contemporaries, such as H. Stuart Hughes, Peter Gay, Leonard Krieger, Carl Schorske, and Fritz Stern, writing European intellectual history meant two things. First, it was a salvage operation, an effort to recall and preserve the traditions of humanism and liberalism destroyed by fascism and Nazism. Second, and related to that task, it entailed writing about other intellectuals—philosophers, social theorists, and novelists and artists of the first rank—who represented the best that had been thought in Europe.

Refugees encounter the legal justice system in Australia: A case study

This article presents a case study of a refugee family and an account of its interaction with the legal justice system in Australia. Often, traumatic histories, as well as socio‐economic disadvantage, of people from a refugee background can contribute to further disadvantage when dealing with law enforcing agencies. In this case the interaction with police resulted in disruption to the family's sense of safety, and the reinforcement of past negative experiences of discrimination, racism and colonialism. The author calls for an assessment of how values, beliefs and police conduct can retraumatise and adversely affect the mental health and well being of people with refugee histories. The implications for access and equity to the law for refugee communities are also considered. Recommendations are made for training in cross‐cultural awareness as well as a critical examination of the culture of the legal system.

Foreign Workers, Refugees and Prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian Agreement

David Bartram argues that Israel's recent acquisition of a sizable foreign labour force carries the potential to complicate negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, especially concerning Palestinian refugees. Though officially temporary, many foreign workers in Israel show signs of long-term settlement, recalling foreign worker experiences in Western Europe and elsewhere. As the Israeli government attempts to manage foreign workers' demands for proper treatment and respect for human and civil rights, what is likely to emerge is the extent to which the country is unprepared to offer any meaningful membership to new populations of non-Jews. The foreign worker episode, then, may reinforce Israel's resistance to demands for the return of Palestinian refugees. As Israel and the PLO/Palestinian Authority stumble towards (and sometimes away from) a comprehensive peace agreement, a new factor in the equation needs to be considered: Israel's new foreign labour force. In this paper the author reviews the history of Palestinian refugees and surveys the problems associated with Israel's recent experience with foreign workers. The importation of these workers signals a transition in Israel's development trajectory that is in all likelihood irreversible, at least in the short term. Specifically, with low-wage foreign labour now constituting more than 10 percent of Israel's labour force, the size of the foreign labour population has easily reached a critical mass that typically leads to permanent settlement and the formation of networks that encourage sustained migration. The availability of low-wage foreign labour is also severely hampering efforts to increase productivity in certain sectors, notably construction. It is argued here that the presence of this new non-Jewish population in Israel is likely to complicate negotiations with the Palestinians concerning difficult outstanding issues, in particular the fate of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Israeli-Arab war. The structure of the Israeli state is not well suited for coping with the prospect of non-Jewish immigration of any type. The government's handling of the foreign workers issue highlights the difficulties involved and has raised sensitivities concerning Israel's ‘self concept’ as a Jewish state. One likely consequence is an increased resistance to demands for the return of Palestinian refugees. This episode thus illustrates the effect of economic development choices on inter-state relations.

Positive Coping Strategies among Immigrant Cambodian Families: An Ethnographic Case Study

This longitudinal, qualitative research study was employed to study service use among poor immigrant families in the context of their neighborhoods. Researchers interviewed Southeast Asian families over a 2‐year period. It was discovered that these families did not rely on traditional service‐delivery models to fulfill family needs. Rather, families tended to rely on each other. We discovered a variety of family strengths, that is, mechanisms that help families adapt and survive. Emerging themes include a focus on education for children, an emphasis on children's safety, insulation of family members, and a reliance on close family and community members. Family and consumer science professionals can benefit by gaining a greater understanding of the history of Cambodian refugees and by recognizing their strengths and coping strategies.