BiblioVault - Books about Refugees

Bad News for Refugees
Greg Philo, Emma Briant, and Pauline Donald
Pluto Press, 2013
Library of Congress HV640.4.G7P49 2013 | Dewey Decimal 070.44936287

Bad News for Refugees analyses the political, economic and environmental contexts of migration and looks specifically at how refugees and asylum seekers have been stigmatised in political rhetoric and in media coverage.

Through forensic research it shows how hysterical and inaccurate media accounts act to legitimise political action which can have terrible consequences both on the lives of refugees and also on established migrant communities.

Based on new research by the renowned Glasgow Media Group, Bad News for Refugees is essential reading for those concerned with the negative effects of media on public understanding and for the safety of vulnerable groups and communities in our society.

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The Balkan Reconquista and Turkey's Forgotten Refugee Crisis
William H. Holt
University of Utah Press, 2019
Library of Congress DR573.H73 2019 | Dewey Decimal 949.60387

During the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–1878, Russian troops, Cossack auxiliaries, and local Bulgarians participated in what today would be called ethnic cleansing. Tensions in the Balkans between Christians and Muslims ended in disaster when hundreds of thousands of Muslims were massacred, raped, and forced to flee from Bulgaria to Turkey as their villages were sacked and their homes destroyed.

In this book, William H. Holt tells the story of a people and moment in time that has largely been neglected in modern Turkish and Balkan memory. Holt uncovers the reasons for this mass forgetting, finding context both within the development of the modern Turkish state and the workings of collective memory. Bringing together a wide array of eyewitness accounts, the book provides unprecedented detail on the plight of the Muslim refugees in their flight from Bulgaria, in Istanbul, and in their resettlement in Anatolia. In crisp, clear, and engaging prose, Holt offers an insightful analysis of human suffering and social memory.

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Becoming Refugee American: The Politics of Rescue in Little Saigon
Phuong Nguyen
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Library of Congress F868.O6N48 2017 | Dewey Decimal 305.906914079496

Vietnamese refugees fleeing the fall of South Vietnam faced a paradox. The same guilt-ridden America that only reluctantly accepted them expected, and rewarded, expressions of gratitude for their rescue. Meanwhile, their status as refugees—as opposed to willing immigrants—profoundly influenced their cultural identity.

Phuong Tran Nguyen examines the phenomenon of refugee nationalism among Vietnamese Americans in Southern California. Here, the residents of Little Saigon keep alive nostalgia for the old regime and, by extension, their claim to a lost statehood. Their refugee nationalism is less a refusal to assimilate than a mode of becoming, in essence, a distinct group of refugee Americans. Nguyen examines the factors that encouraged them to adopt this identity. His analysis also moves beyond the familiar rescue narrative to chart the intimate yet contentious relationship these Vietnamese Americans have with their adopted homeland. Nguyen sets their plight within the context of the Cold War, an era when Americans sought to atone for broken promises but also saw themselves as providing a sanctuary for people everywhere fleeing communism.

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Belonging and Becoming in a Multicultural World: Refugee Youth and the Pursuit of Identity
Laura Moran
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Library of Congress HV640.4.A78 | Dewey Decimal 305.235086914099

Children and youth are front and center in the context of global mass migration and the social discord around questions of multicultural inclusion that it often ignites. Imprecise portrayals of their inclination to either embrace diversity or to incite racism are used to exemplify both the success and failures of the multicultural project. In the context of young people’s heightened politicization, Open Access volume Belonging and Becoming in a Multicultural World shifts the focus to a group of Sudanese and Karen refugee youth’s own insights, explanations and practices as they attempt to create a sense of identity and belonging in Australia. These young people engage race, racism and national identity in creative and unexpected ways as they are confronted with the social and moral implications of multiculturalism.

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Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany
Anna Holian
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Library of Congress D809.G3H64 2011 | Dewey Decimal 940.530869140943

In May of 1945, there were more than eight million “displaced persons” (or DPs) in Germany—recently liberated foreign workers, concentration camp prisoners, and prisoners of war from all of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as eastern Europeans who had fled west before the advancing Red Army. Although most of them quickly returned home, it soon became clear that large numbers of eastern European DPs could or would not do so. Focusing on Bavaria, in the heart of the American occupation zone, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism examines the cultural and political worlds that four groups of displaced persons—Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish—created in Germany during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The volume investigates the development of refugee communities and how divergent interpretations of National Socialism and Soviet Communism defined these displaced groups.

Combining German and eastern European history, Anna Holian draws on a rich array of sources in cultural and political history and engages the broader literature on displacement in the fields of anthropology, sociology, political theory, and cultural studies. Her book will interest students and scholars of German, eastern European, and Jewish history; migration and refugees; and human rights.

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Beyond Displacement: Campesinos, Refugees, and Collective Action in the Salvadoran Civil War
Molly Todd
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
Library of Congress F1488.3.T63 2011 | Dewey Decimal 972.84053

During the civil war that wracked El Salvador from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, the Salvadoran military tried to stamp out dissidence and insurgency through an aggressive campaign of crop-burning, kidnapping, rape, killing, torture, and gruesome bodily mutilations. Even as human rights violations drew world attention, repression and war displaced more than a quarter of El Salvador’s population, both inside the country and beyond its borders. Beyond Displacement examines how the peasant campesinos of war-torn northern El Salvador responded to violence by taking to the hills. Molly Todd demonstrates that their flight was not hasty and chaotic, but was a deliberate strategy that grew out of a longer history of collective organization, mobilization, and self-defense.

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Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860
Harvey Whitfield
University Press of New England, 2006
Library of Congress F1040.N3W47 2006 | Dewey Decimal 971.60496073

Following the American Revolution, free black communities and enslaved African Americans increasingly struggled to reconcile their African heritage with their American home. This struggle resulted in tens of thousands of African Americans seeking new homes in areas as diverse as Haiti and Nova Scotia. Black refugees arrived in Nova Scotia after the War of 1812 with little in common but their desire for freedom. By 1860, they had formed families, communities, and traditions. Harvey Amani Whitfield’s study reconstructs the lives and history of a sizeable but neglected group of African Americans by placing their history within the framework of free black communities in New England and Nova Scotia during the nineteenth century. It examines which aspects of American and African American culture black expatriates used or discarded in an area that forced them to negotiate the overlapping worlds of Great Britain, the United States, Afro–New England, and the African American Diaspora, while considering how former American slaves understood freedom long before the Civil War.

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Blockaders, Refugees, and Contrabands: Civil War on Florida's Gulf Coast, 1861-1865
George E. Buker
University of Alabama Press, 2004
Library of Congress E600.B85 2004 | Dewey Decimal 973.75

Chronicles the role of the East Gulf Blockading Squadron as an important Federal contingent in Florida.

"[Buker] argues that the presence of Union sailors and their extensive contacts ashore did serious damage to home-front morale and retarded Florida's value as a component of the rebel war machine. Since the state's long coastlines made it a ready target for a naval cordon, its commercial life suffered beginning in 1861 and deteriorated even further as the war progressed despite the efforts of blockade runners. Florida Unionists, antiwar natives, and runaway slaves flocked to these Federal warships to seek protection and quickly became a source of manpower for their crews as well as for land forces."

—Journal of Southern History

"The proliferation of publications concerning the American Civil War occasionally produces one that really contributes to our understanding of that conflict. George E. Buker’s Blockaders, Refugees, and Contrabands is such a book."

—Journal of American History

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Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835
Rafe Blaufarb
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Library of Congress F335.F8B58 2005 | Dewey Decimal 976.105

Discusses the ill-fated Vine and Olive Colony within the context of America's westward expansion and the French Revolution

Bonapartists in the Borderlands recounts how Napoleonic exiles and French refugees from Europe and the Caribbean joined forces with Latin American insurgents, Gulf pirates, and international adventurers to seek their fortune in the Gulf borderlands. The U.S. Congress welcomed the French to America and granted them a large tract of rich Black Belt land near Demopolis, Alabama, on the condition that they would establish a Mediterranean-style Vine and Olive colony.

This book debunks the standard account of the colony, which stresses the failure of the aristocratic, luxury-loving French to tame the wilderness. Instead, it shows that the Napoleonic officers involved in the colony sold their land shares to speculators to finance an even more perilous adventure--invading the contested Texas borderlands between Spain and the U.S. Their departure left the Vine and Olive colony in the hands of French refugees from the Haitian slave revolt. While they soon abandoned vine cultivation, they successfully recast themselves as prosperous, slaveholding cotton growers and gradually fused into a new elite with newly arrived Anglo-American planters.

Rafe Blaufarb examines the underlying motivations and aims that inspired this endeavor and details the nitty-gritty politics, economics, and backroom bargaining that resulted in the settlement. He employs a wide variety of local, national, and international resources: from documents held by the Alabama State Archives, Marengo County court records, and French-language newspapers published in America to material from the War Ministry Archives at Vincennes, the Diplomatic Archives at the Quai d’Orasy, and the French National Archives.

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The Borders of "Europe": Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering
Nicholas De Genova, editor
Duke University Press, 2017
Library of Congress JV7590.B675 2017

In recent years the borders of Europe have been perceived as being besieged by a staggering refugee and migration crisis. The contributors to The Borders of "Europe" see this crisis less as an incursion into Europe by external conflicts than as the result of migrants exercising their freedom of movement. Addressing the new technologies and technical forms European states use to curb, control, and constrain what contributors to the volume call the autonomy of migration, this book shows how the continent's amorphous borders present a premier site for the enactment and disputation of the very idea of Europe. They also outline how from Istanbul to London, Sweden to Mali, and Tunisia to Latvia, migrants are finding ways to subvert visa policies and asylum procedures while negotiating increasingly militarized and surveilled borders. Situating the migration crisis within a global frame and attending to migrant and refugee supporters as well as those who stoke nativist fears, this timely volume demonstrates how the enforcement of Europe’s borders is an important element of the worldwide regulation of human mobility.

Contributors. Ruben Andersson, Nicholas De Genova, Dace Dzenovska, Evelina Gambino, Glenda Garelli, Charles Heller, Clara Lecadet, Souad Osseiran, Lorenzo Pezzani, Fiorenza Picozza, Stephan Scheel, Maurice Stierl, Laia Soto Bermant, Martina Tazzioli

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Bosnian Studies: Perspectives from an Emerging Field
Dzeneta Karabegovic
University of Missouri Press, 2023
Library of Congress DR1750 | Dewey Decimal 949.742

It has been 27 years since the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the history of the conflict, its consequences, and long-term implications for the politics and lives of its citizens has remained a source of interest for scholars across the globe and across disciplines. This scholarship has included works by historians and political scientists seeking to explain the war’s origins with a view to Bosnia’s traditional multi-ethnic character and background. The country has been used as a case study in state- and peace-building, as well as to study the implications of ongoing transitional justice processes. Other scholars within the fields of human rights and genocide studies have focused on documenting the war crimes committed against the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the conflict and the mass-scale displacement of people, mostly Bosnian Muslims, from their homes and homelands. International law scholars have carried this work further, tracing the development of courts created in response to war crimes in Bosnia and their effectiveness in generating justice for victims.

Diaspora communities have formed in North America (especially in St. Louis), Europe, and Australia because of war and displacement, and have themselves become a considerable topic of study spanning the disciplines of anthropology, migration studies, political science, memory studies, conflict and security studies, psychology, and geography.

This volume seeks to illuminate how Bosnian migrant and diaspora scholars are contributing to the development of Bosnian Studies. The authors included in this volume are either writing from their (new) home bases in Australia, Austria, Canada, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the
United States, among others, or they have returned to Bosnia after a period of migration. Their chapters have distinct entry points of inquiry, demonstrating how scholars have integrated Bosnia as a theme across the range of disciplines in which they are situated. The selections
included in the volume range from literary analysis to personal memoirs of the conflict, from studies of heritage and identity to political science analysis of diaspora voting, to genocide studies and questions of (or lack of) ethics in the growing field of Bosnian Studies.

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