As they trudged over the Pyrenees, the Spanish republicans became one of the most iconoclastic groups of refugees to have sought refuge in twentieth-century France. This book explores the array of opportunities, constraints, choices and motivations that characterised their lives. Using a wide range of empirical material, it presents a compelling case for rethinking exile in relation to refugees’ lived experiences and memory activities. The major historical events of the period are covered: the development of refugees’ rights and the ‘concentration’ camps of the Third Republic, the para-military labour formations of the Second World War, the dynamics shaping resistance activities, and the role of memory in the campaign to return to Spain. This study additionally analyses how these experiences have shaped homes and France’s memorial landscape, thereby offering an unparalleled exploration of the long-term effects of exile from the mass exodus of 1939 through to the seventieth-anniversary commemorations in 2009.

The displaced are often rendered silent and invisible as they journey in search of refuge. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples from Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, Iraq, Syria, UK, Germany, France, the Balkan Peninsula, US, Canada, Australia, and Kenya, the contributions to this volume draw attention to refugees, asylum seekers, exiles, and forced migrants as individual subjects with memories, hopes, needs, rights, and a prospective place in collective memory. The book's wide-ranging theoretical, literary, artistic, and autobiographical contributions appeal to scholarly and lay readers who share concerns about the fate of the displaced in relation to the emplaced in this age of mass mobility.

Somalis have been leaving their country for the last fifteen years, fleeing civil war, difficult economic conditions, drought and famine, and now constitute one of the largest diasporas in the world. Organized in the framework of collaboration between UNHCR and different countries, this research focuses on the secondary movements of Somali refugees. It was carried out as a multi-sited project in the following countries: Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Netherlands, South Africa, Switzerland and Yemen. The report provides a detailed insight into the movements of Somali refugees that is, their trajectories, the different stages in their migra-tion history and their underlying motivations. It also gives a compara-tive overview of different protection regimes and practices.

This book is a vital exploration of the harrowing stories of mass displacement that took place in the first half of the 20th century from the perspective of forced migrants themselves. The volume brings together 15 interrelated case studies which show how the deportation, evacuation and flight of millions of people as a result of the First World War intensified rather than alleviated ethnic conflicts which culminated in population transfers on an even larger scale during and immediately after the Second World War. While each chapter focuses on a different group of refugees and displaced persons, the text as a whole looks at the experience of forced migration as a complex set of evolving relationships with the receiving society, the homeland, the broader diaspora and other migrant communities living within the same host country. This innovative, four-dimensional model provides an overarching conceptual framework that binds the chapters together within the longer arc of European history. By going beyond the conventional narratives of national victimhood and (un)successful assimilation of refugees, A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe reveals that identities of forced migrants in the first half of the 20th century were individualised, hybrid and constantly reconstructed in response to socioeconomic forces and political pressures. The case studies collected in this volume further suggest that age, gender, social class, educational level and the personal experiences of 'unwilling nomads' are more important to the understanding of forced migration history than ethnoreligious identities of victims and perpetrators.

Since the 1980s the study of genocide has exploded, both historically and geographically, to encompass earlier epochs, other continents, and new cases. The concept of genocide has proved its worth, but that expansion has also compounded the tensions between a rigid legal concept and the manifold realities researchers have discovered. The legal and political benefits that accompany genocide status have also reduced complex discussions of historical events to a simplistic binary – is it genocide or not? – a situation often influenced by powerful political pressures. Genocide addresses these tensions and tests the limits of the concept in cases ranging from the role of sexual violence during the Holocaust to state-induced mass starvation in Kazakh and Ukrainian history, while considering what the Armenian, Rwandan, and Burundi experiences reveal about the uses and pitfalls of reading history and conducting politics through the lens of genocide. Contributors examine the pressures that great powers have exerted in shaping the concept; the reaction Raphaël Lemkin, originator of the word “genocide,” had to the United Nations’ final resolution on the subject; France’s long-held choice not to use the concept of genocide in its courtrooms; the role of transformative social projects and use of genocide memory in politics; and the relation of genocide to mass violence targeting specific groups. Throughout, this comprehensive text offers innovative solutions to address the limitations of the genocide concept, while preserving its usefulness as an analytical framework.

In The Mist-Filled Path, Frank MacEowen shows how embracing the indigenous wisdom of Scotland and Ireland can lead to healing and transcendence. Using his own travels and teachings along with Celtic stories and myths, he explores ancient traditions, ecopsychology, the ancient mother, altars and hearths, Oran Mor (the Great Song), contemplation, and mysticism. The book tells how to draw on ancestral roots to find a personal spirituality that also works for the greater good.

This book examines the distinction between literary expatriation and exile through a 'contrapuntal reading' of modern Palestinian and American writing. It argues that exile, in the Palestinian case especially, is a political catastrophe; it is banishment by a colonial power. It suggests that, unlike expatriation (a choice of a foreign land over one’s own), exile is a political rather than an artistic concept and is forced rather than voluntary — while exile can be emancipatory, it is always an unwelcome loss. In addition to its historical dimension, exile also entails a different perception of return to expatriation. This book frames expatriates as quintessentially American, particularly intellectuals and artists seeking a space of creativity and social dissidence in the experience of living away from home. At the heart of both literary discourses, however, is a preoccupation with home, belonging, identity, language, mobility and homecoming.