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This book talks about the mass displacement of civilians, estimated to be 14 to 15 million, in the twentieth-century Europe during the First World War. It looks at the causes and consequences of the refugee crisis and its aftermath, and the attempts to understand its significance. Key sites of displacement extended from Belgium to Armenia, taking in France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, East Prussia, the Russian Empire, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Serbia. The German army's occupation of Belgium, France, Poland and Lithuania prompted the mass flight of refugees, as did Russia's invasion of East Prussia in 1914. Jewish, Ruthenian and Polish civilians in the Habsburg Empire fled their homes or were deported by the military to distant locations. Following Italy's attack on Austria-Hungary in May 1915, the Habsburg authorities ordered around 100,000 Slovenian subjects of the empire to leave. The Austrian and Bulgarian invasion of Serbia brought about a humanitarian catastrophe as civilians and the remnants of the Serbian army sought safety elsewhere. However, mass flight of civilian refugees did not begin in 1914 nor did it come to an end in 1918. Muslim refugees fled to the relative safety of Anatolia in order to escape violent persecution by Bulgarian and other forces during the Balkan Wars on 1912-13. There were complex movements of population between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey before 1914. The complex process of repatriation and resettlement affected soldiers and civilians alike and rarely took place in stable or peaceful circumstances.
, suggests that the promotion of self-reliance through vocational training and entrepreneurship programmes has become the new neoliberal mantra also among refugee-supporting agencies, policymakers and different humanitarian actors ( Easton-Calabria and Omata, 2018 ; Turner, 2019 ; Richey and Brockington, 2020 ). Yet, little attention has been devoted to exploring how the discourse of entrepreneurship is mobilised for the presumed benefit of refugee women in the realm of humanitarian governance, here
attend NGO classes. In 2016, she joined Queens of Syria , a much acclaimed theatre production performed by refugee women in Amman, for a three-week tour to the UK. On stage, the women recited dialogues that drew parallels between the enslavement of Trojan women in Euripides’ famous tragedy and their personal experiences of loss and displacement in Syria. While Marwa’s husband was initially reluctant to let her act, she managed to convince him by pointing out that her
humanitarian past, there is a brief account of the history of wristbands in refugee management and child nutrition to illustrate how tracking devices have been used for control and governance purposes. Section 4 offers an inventory of proposed aid uses of wearables – the central issue here is not present or future uses but what is imagined as possible, appropriate or useful interventions and – crucially – for whom? Section 5 reflects on how wearables challenge our basic
with individuals from refugee backgrounds. The book addresses the overarching question of how individuals from refugee backgrounds use digital technology to fulfil their communication and information needs. In doing so, Leung describes the scenarios and challenges that refugees face in the three stages that typically describe their journeys: before displacement, during displacement (in transit, refugee camps or detention centres) and resettlement. In her analysis, she rejects the simplistic
approach to innovation in humanitarian action, and other calls have been made specifically to devise principles for ethical humanitarian innovations. The need to make innovation ethical implies that unethical forms exist, which raises the questions of who is to judge and at what point in time ( Elhra, n.d. ; University of Oxford, Refugee Studies Centre, 2015 ). Arguably, innovation in the humanitarian field has always been contested, with over-optimistic assumptions about technological fixes matched by
. (2011) for the case of ‘households’). But problems in collecting quantitative data are not just definitional. Crisp (1999 : 4) highlighted the logistical problems of collecting refugee statistics in the 1990s. Crisp (1999 : 6–8) explains that low resources and insufficient labour meant that counting large populations was operationally extremely challenging. Even in spaces that seem to be prime for bureaucratic processes, such as refugee camps, issues of counting populations are rife
people crossing the Med. Caroline Abu Sa’Da is General Director of its Swiss branch. Juliano Fiori: SOS is very much a product of contemporary Europe. It’s a civic response to refugees and migrants in the Med but also to nationalistic politics, or to the return of nationalist movements to the forefront of European politics. How, then, does SOS differ from European humanitarian NGOs founded in past decades? Caroline Abu Sa’Da: SOS is a European citizen movement. Besides our search-and-rescue activities, we aim to give to the greatest number of
entanglements between visual media and humanitarianism. Meanwhile, other historians, international relations scholars, and political theorists have shed much light on the visual politics of aid, including works on the innocent figure of the child to depoliticize controversial contexts and build empathetic responses to distant suffering ( Burman, 1994 ; Campbell, 2012 ; Fehrenbach, 2015 ; Gigliotti, 2018 ; Gorin, 2015 ; Taithe, 2010 ), the dehistoricization and feminization of the refugee
Introduction In October 2016 the New York Review of Books published an article by International Rescue Committee President David Miliband titled ‘The Best Ways to Deal with the Refugee Crisis’. It began with a predictable target. US Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s claims about a ‘tremendous flow’ of Syrian refugees making their way to North America were based in ‘myth, not fact’, Miliband wrote ( Miliband, 2016 ). Not only that: they also