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According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there were 22.5 million refugees globally in 2014 (UNHCR, 2017 ). Research shows that of these 22.5 million, at least 6.6 million were stateless (Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, 2014 ). This year was by no means exceptional. The number of stateless refugees makes up a substantial
security frameworks – and the Hobbesian social contract underpinning them – more profoundly apparent than regarding the stateless: refugees and asylum-seekers in global politics. Refugees and asylum-seekers point both to the failure of some states to live up to their obligations of providing for the wellbeing of their populations, and to the ultimate inability for traditional
6 Refugees and runners During 1976, when researching her book A Place Apart, the writer Dervla Murphy reported hearing anti-Northern sentiments with increasing vehemence and frequency. Some such outbursts may be excused on grounds of frustration and despair but most, I fear, are symptoms of a spreading infection … a new form of intolerance … between Southern and Northern Catholics.1 A few years later, Vincent Browne also asserted that ‘the divide between the Catholic community in Northern Ireland and the rest of the population … is deeper than ever’. Indeed
the state as an independent and sovereign nation-state and the granting of human rights is deeply rooted in the environment that creates stateless beings. We can see this particularly through the example of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and how Pakistan’s national policies and legal system interact with international law on statelessness. ‘Statelessness
ideas of whiteness and the plurality of racisms have to be more carefully scrutinised in the context of non-white newcomers to Ireland (and indeed, elsewhere). Both implicitly and explicitly, this is one of the goals of our work and in the broader collection as a whole. This chapter focuses on the everyday life experiences of African asylum seekers and refugees on the island of Ireland in order to consider different notions of belonging, ‘racisms’ 1 and integration at play. Key to our thinking herein is the fact that asylum seekers’ and
the rapid influx of people, the Jordanian government opened Za’atari refugee camp in late July 2012, with support from the Jordan Hashemite Charity Organisation, United Nations agencies and other partners. 3 In the harsh conditions of Jordan’s northern desert, Za’atari rapidly became a massive aid operation and at the same time the media face of not only the refugee crisis in Jordan but across the
Scholars and practitioners alike have identified interventions on behalf of Armenians as watersheds in the history of humanitarianism. This volume reassesses these claims, critically examining a range of interventions by governments, international and diasporic organisations and individuals that aimed to bring ‘aid to Armenia’. Drawing on perspectives from a range of disciplines, the chapters trace the history of these interventions from the 1890s to the present, paying particular attention to the aftermaths of the Genocide and the upheavals of the post-Soviet period. Geographically, they connect diverse spaces, including the Caucasus, Russia and the Middle East, Europe, North America and South America, and Australia, revealing shifting transnational networks of aid and intervention. These chapters are followed by reflections by leading scholars in the fields of refugee history and Armenian history, Professor Peter Gatrell and Professor Ronald Grigor Suny, respectively.
A Matter of Intelligence is a book about the British Security Service MI5. More specifically, it concerns one particular aspect of its work, the surveillance of anti-Nazi German refugees during the 1930s and 1940s. When Hitler took power in 1933, the Nazis began a reign of terror against their political opponents: communists, socialists, pacifists and liberals, many of whom were forced to flee Germany. Some of these ‘political’ refugees came to Britain, where MI5 kept them under close surveillance. This study is based on the personal and organisational files that MI5 kept on them during the 1930s and 1940s – or at least those that have been released to the National Archives – making it equally a study of the political refugees themselves. Although this surveillance exercise formed an important part of MI5's work during that period, it is a part which it seems to have disowned or at any rate forgotten: the recent official history of MI5 does not even mention it, nor do its ‘unofficial’ counterparts. This study therefore fills a considerable gap in historical research. It traces the development of MI5 surveillance of German-speaking refugees through the case files of some of its individual targets and of the main refugee organisations; it also considers the refugees’ British supporters and the refugee informants who spied on fellow-refugees, as well as MI5's tussles with the Home Office and other official bodies. Finally, it assesses how successful – or how useful – this hidden surveillance exercise actually was.
Divisions between north and south Ireland were prevalent since the 1920s. Yet, until the 1970s, nobody in public life in the Republic of Ireland argued that partition was justified. This book examines in detail the impact of the Northern Irish Troubles on southern Irish society during the period 1968-79. It begins with the aftermath of the civil rights march in Derry in October 1968 and traces the reaction to the events until the autumn of 1972. The impact of August 1969, the aftermath of internment and the response to Bloody Sunday are examined. The book looks at violence south of the border, particularly bombings and shootings and their human cost, and examines state security, censorship and the popular protests associated with these issues. A general outlook at the changing attitudes to refugees and northern nationalists is provided before describing the impact of the conflict on southern Protestants. The controversies concerning the Irish Republican Army and their activities are highlighted. The book looks at the question of revisionism and how debates about history were played out in academia as well as at a popular level. A variety of social and cultural responses to the conflict are examined, including attitudes to Britain and northern Unionists. For many southerners, Ulster was practically a foreign country and Northern Ireland did not seem very Irish. By 1979, the prospect of an end to the conflict seemed dim.
How does migration feature in states’ diplomatic agendas across the Middle East? Until recently, popular wisdom often held that migration is an important socio-economic, rather than political, phenomenon. Migration diplomacy in the Middle East counters this expectation by providing the first systematic examination of the foreign policy importance of migrants, refugees, and diasporas in the Global South. Gerasimos Tsourapas examines how emigration-related processes become embedded in governmental practices of establishing and maintaining power; how states engage with migrant and diasporic communities residing in the West; how oil-rich Arab monarchies have extended their support for a number of sending states’ ruling regimes via cooperation on labour migration; and, finally, how labour and forced migrants may serve as instruments of political leverage. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork and data collection and employing a range of case studies across the Middle East and North Africa, Tsourapas enhances existing understandings of regional migration governance in the Global South. The book identifies how the management of cross-border mobility in the Middle East is not primarily dictated by legal, moral, or human rights considerations but driven by states’ actors key concern – political power. Offering key insights into the history and current migration policy dilemmas, the book will provide both novices and specialists with fresh insights on migration into, out of, and across the modern Middle East.