The Center for Arts and Humanities (CAH)

cordially invites you to the conference

A Century of Human Displacement

and Dispossession:
Europe and the Middle East
Designed and produced by the Office of Communications | 2019

1919–2019
May 14, 15 and 16, 2019 | Auditorium B1, College Hall
 Discursive Constructions of the 2015 Refugee Crisis:
Ambivalence, Humanization and Othering

Dalia Abdelhady
Lund University
My paper tackles the discursive construction of the 2015 “refugee crisis,” particularly of Syrian
refugees, in mainstream newspapers in Jordan, Turkey and Sweden. Analyzing all newspaper articles
addressing displacement in two newspapers in each context, the paper disentangles the crisis discourse
and shows its contextual formulation. Such disentanglement is achieved in three specific findings that
are discussed for each of the contexts separately. First, my analysis shows that contradiction and
uncertainty are the main building blocks in the media constructions of the refugee crisis in 2015 in the
three contexts.
Despite the discerned ambivalence in the coverage, the second part of my argument scrutinizes
the frames used in the total sample of articles. Previous studies analyzing media representations of
displacement in previous decades highlight the emphasis on vulnerability and victimization that often
othered and dehumanized refugees. My analysis shows that media coverage of the 2015 crisis differed
from previous patterns and relied heavily on humanized portrayals of refugees. Specifically, I show that
in the newspapers analyzed in the three countries human-interest stories represent a large portion of the
overall coverage of the refugee crisis. These portrayals are intended to trigger sympathy and support
for the refugees and justify efforts responding to the humanitarian crisis.
Digging deeper within the subset of human-interest stories and fleshing out the constructions
of responsibility and benevolence towards refugees, the third component of my argument uncovers
processes of othering that are also found within the same frame. I show that representations of
generosity and compassion are not devoid of an emphasis on cultural difference. The specific form of
othering is an area where the constructions in the three contexts diverge. In Sweden, othering based on
Islam is easily identifiable, but such framing does not negate the possibility of cultural integration. In
Jordan and Turkey, othering takes more subtle yet immutable forms that build on moral differences.
Such difference, I conclude, shed new light into our understanding of policy responses, socio-cultural
contexts of reception and refugees’ own experiences of displacement and mobility.

Biography: Dalia Abdelhady is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Centre for Middle Eastern
Studies at Lund University in Sweden. She is the author of The Lebanese Diaspora: The Arab
Immigrant Experience in New York, Montreal and Paris published in 2011 by New York University
Press where she studied diasporic forms of identification, communal attachments and cultural
expression. She has also written about the children of immigrants (the second-generation) within a
comparative perspective in a number of articles and book chapters. Her current project investigates
media portrayals of the refugee crisis of 2015 as a way of understanding narratives of national identities
and responses to globalization. At present, she is editing The Routledge Handbook on Middle Eastern
Diasporas.

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 Population transfers and exchanges in Southeastern Europe during the Second World War –
An overview

Viorel Achim
Nicolae Iorga Institute of History, Bucharest

In the years of the Second World War, Southeastern Europe was the scene of population
movements that affected hundreds of thousands of people. The region has experienced phenomena such
as population transfers, population exchanges, refuges, forced emigration, expulsions, deportations, and
internal colonizations. These population movements were part of the ethnic cleansing policies practiced
by Romania, Bulgaria and the Independent State of Croatia, the three states that existed in the region
after Albania, Greece and Yugoslavia were occupied by fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, but also the
similar policy practiced by Hungary, which reached to rule Romanian and Yugoslav territories. These
population movements also affected countries outside the region: Germany, Hungary and the Soviet
Union.
The paper deals with two categories of population movements that took place in Southeastern
Europe between 1940-1945: population transfers and population exchanges, which were made on the
basis of bilateral agreements between governments. The Romanian-Bulgarian population exchange in
Dobrudja, the repatriation in the Reich of the ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) of Bessarabia, Northern
and Southern Bukovina and Dobrudja, the repatriation of the Hungarians from Banovina in southern
Croatia and of Hungarian groups from Romania (the Szeklers in Southern Bukovina, the Hungarians in
Bessarabia, groups of Csangos in Moldavia), the displacement of the Gottscheer from the Province of
Ljubljana (the southern part of Slovenia under the occupation of Italy) to the Brežice Triangle in Lower
Styria (in the north of Slovenia, under German occupation), have been realized in those years and other
population movements have remained in the project phase.
Transfers and population exchanges that have been made in those years and projects that have
not been put into practice will be analyzed in the light of their common characteristics in an attempt to
detect a regional specificity. Their political conditionality and dependence on the international
conjuncture and on the course of war in the East will be approached. The influence of Nazi Germany is
evident, the countries of Southeast Europe have rallied to a certain extent to the Nazi policy of ethnic
restructuring of Europe, but what has happened here is also related to the previous policies of ethnic
homogenization practiced by the Balkan countries starting with the 19th century.

Biography: Viorel Achim is a Senior Researcher at the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History, Romanian
Academy, Bucharest. His research fields include ethnic minorities in Romania between 1918-1948,
population policies in Romania during World War II, the Holocaust, and the history of Gypsies (Roma).
His most recent books are Politica regimului Antonescu faţă de cultele neoprotestante. Documente [The
Policy of the Antonescu Regime towards the Neoprotestant Denominations. Documents] (Iaşi: Polirom,
2013) and Munca forţată în Transnistria. “Organizarea muncii” evreilor, decembrie 1942 – martie
1944 [The Forced Labor in Transnistria. The “Labor Organization” for Jews and Roma, December
1942-March 1944] (Târgovişte: Cetatea de Scaun, 2015).

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Embracing and Expelling Populations: State-Building, Sovereignty and Migration Management
in Greece and Turkey

Fiona B. Adamson
SOAS, University of London

Gerasimos Tsourapas
University of Birmingham

A key function of the modern sovereign state is population management (Torpey 1997). Yet
how states have managed “their” populations has changed over time, according to factors such as their
stage of state-formation and consolidation, their position in the international system, the nature of state
interests and institutions, and the influence of external actors, including powerful states and
international organizations. In this paper, we use the cases of Greece and Turkey to explore these
dynamics via a paired comparison. Greece and Turkey have a shared history, a common border and
have faced similar dynamics with regard to cross-border migration movements. Yet, there are also some
striking differences between the two states, including their internal political trajectories and their
relationship to the European Union and other external actors. We examine the evolution of migration
management regimes in these two countries, from bilateral cooperation over population exchanges in
the 1920s, to their participation in European guest-worker programmes in the 1960s-70s, to the
management of regional refugee crises in the 2010s. We show how state interest in maintaining
sovereignty has shaped migration regimes in both cases, but that the strategies used to do so have
evolved over time in response to different sets of internal and external pressures.

Biographies: Fiona B. Adamson is an Associate Professor (Reader) of International Relations in the

SOAS Department of Politics and International Studies. Her expertise is in international migration,
diaspora politics, transnationalism, global governance and peace and security. Adamson has published
in political science, international relations and migration journals such as International Security,
European Journal of International Relations, International Migration Review, International Studies
Review, Journal of Global Security Studies, Current History, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies,
International Studies Perspectives, Cambridge Review of International Affairs and Political Science
Quarterly. Dr Adamson is co-convener of the London Migration Research Group (LMRG) and serves
on the editorial boards of the American Political Science Review (APSR), European Journal of
International Relations (EJIR) and Ethnopolitics. She served as Chair of the SOAS Department of
Politics and International Studies (2010-13) and was previously Director of the Program in International
Public Policy at University College London (UCL). Dr Adamson was a Leverhulme Research Fellow
in 2015-17 and has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, Stanford University, Humboldt
University in Berlin and University of Basel, Switzerland. Dr Adamson received her PhD from
Columbia University and BA from Stanford University.

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Gerasimos Tsourapas is a Lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Birmingham. His
research focuses on the politics of migrants, refugees, and diasporas in the broader Middle East. He is
currently the Principal Investigator in two research projects: “The International Politics of Middle East
Migration: Problems, Policy, Practice,” funded by a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award,
and “Migration Diplomacy in the Eastern Mediterranean: Inter-State Politics of Population Mobility in
the Middle East,” funded by the Council for British Research in the Levant. He sits on the Executive
Committee of the Ethnicity, Nationalism and Migration Section of the International Studies
Association, and the Council of the Migration & Citizenship Section of the American Political Science
Association. He co-edited a special issue of International Political Science Review (with Maria
Koinova) on ‘Diasporas and Sending States in World Politics’ (2018). His first book, The Politics of
Egyptian Migration - Strategies for Survival in Autocracies, has been published by Cambridge
University Press (2019).

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 “Reversed Reality”:
Displacement of European Refugees in Egypt during the Second World War

Kornelija Ajlec
University of Ljubljana

Hannah Arendt determined that the lives of the refugees were dominated by the power and
interpretations of a singular state. However, during the Second World War, international relief
organizations took on a role in the care of the refugees far greater than ever before. They began to
influence recipient countries by engaging in diplomatic discourse, frequently expanding bilateral
relations between recipient countries and those who were dominating the individual relief organization
the most. The first groups influenced by these newly established relations were the European refugees
who sought shelter in Egypt and broader Middle East region. With the British aid, the Greek refugees
began arriving in 1941, followed by the Yugoslavs in 1944. Although the Egyptian government
welcomed the refugees at first, it soon began to limit their number under the strain of difficult domestic
economic conditions. It was the British relief organization Middle East Relief and Refugee
Administration (MERRA) who first led the negotiations for the settlement and care of the refugees. It
later merged with the new supranational United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
(UNRRA) which assumed all diplomatic talks with Egyptian Government. The presentation will
examine the influence that the afore-mentioned diplomatic relations had on the lives of the refugees
through the perspectives of their placement, freedom of movement and sustenance, going far beyond
the interpretations of a singular host state.

Biography: Kornelija Ajlec, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in Contemporary World History at the
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts. She specializes in events and processes during and after the
Second World War, with particular interest in relations between Yugoslavia/Slovenia and international
organizations, mostly focusing on the topics of refugees and post-war rehabilitation.

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The Politics of home and identity in Post-colonial Contemporary English Fiction (1956 – 2003),

Akram Al Deek
American University of Madaba

This project uses cultural and literary theory and post-colonial fictions to revisit the concept of
displacement allowing for an affirmation of the specificity and beginnings of displaced writers’
identities meanwhile resisting, precluding, falling into the dangers of cultural and mental ghettoisation
and vulgar nationalism. Displacement here troubles the ideas of citizenship and national belonging and
offers to the non-citizen the freedom to be ‘out of place’ which opens doors for and promotes the
rediscovery, as in the Freudian psychoanalytic context, of materials that have been repressed or ‘pushed
aside’ in cultural translation.
Being a third-generation Palestinian exile, German by nationality, Jordanian by birth, and
writing in English, I suggest that an identity should resiliently take on what Stuart Hall calls a ‘cultural
turn’. Displacement allows for critical and aesthetic distance, and balancing the central authority
between past and present, tradition and modernity, by translating (between) them.
Furthermore, the time-frame this project covers starts with mass migrations and national independences
post-WW2, the subsequent cultural studies which were born after, and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely
Londoners in 1956, up until 2003 marked by Ali’s Brick lane, encompassing between them a plethora
of hyphenated and double-cast generations of displaced persons. This army of displaced migrant writers
marks a shifting boundary that problematises the frontier of the modern nation-state and engenders a
synthesis of cultures and a peaceful celebration of living in the potential radiance of Babylon.
Two main complications arise and are tackled here: racial discrimination and exclusion; and
the emergence of what Salman Rushdie calls ‘ghetto mentality’. I suggest an oscillation at ease between
melancholy and celebration, and how a cultural turn helps in doing so. I, furthermore, establish an
interrelated connectedness between place, nostalgia and memory to demonstrate the effect of place upon
the displaced self, its identity and sense of belonging. Memory and nostalgia are particularly addressed
here for they accentuate the importance and influence of the past and especially of starting points and
the perpetual longing for a return to homely beginnings in the course of displacement. I further add an
exemplary differentiation and contrast between the Palestinian exile and the subsequent salvation of the
Jewish diaspora.
Drawing on generational differences of their conceptions of home and identity, I conclude by
highlighting the changes in the politics of home and identity after the 9/11 and the war on terrorism. I
also highlight the differences between a passive and an active migrant and how they affect
multiculturalism. The conclusion also emphasizes on how the world must be seen in a terms of joined
currents and shared histories as opposed to stereotypical imagery, facing difference with violence, and
monatomic cultural maintenance.

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Biography: Akram Al Deek is an assistant Professor English, majored in post-colonial world literature,
the former Acting Vice Dean of the Faculty of Languages and Communication, and Head of the
Departments of English Language and Literature, and Department of Translation at The American
University of Madaba, Jordan. Dr Al Deek is the author of Writing Displacement: home and identity in
contemporary post-colonial English fiction (Palgrave Macmillan: London and New York: 2016), author
of Eucalyptus Obliqua: episodes of dispersals (Ward: Jordan: 2019), contributory columnist and writer
in the Jordan Times, co-founder of Writers in Amman (Jordan), former academic lecturer in Sunderland
University (UK), Jordan University and Middle East University (Jordan), and former Director and
Assessor of English and Communication Skills in Working Links (UK) funded by The Ministry of
Justice and European Union. Dr Al Deek is also a frequent judge in (inter)national creative writing
competitions, public intellectual, and speaker on the politics of home and identity, exile and migration.
Al Deek’s nomadic existence has lent his writing a cosmopolitan edge.

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 Jewish Refugees and Migrants in the Balkans

Bojan Aleksov
University College London

Rise of nationalism, dissolution of Empires and rise of new states in the early 20th century
created new borders but also unleashed massive migrations in East, Central and Southeast Europe. One
that is relatively little studied is that of Jews to areas where there were relatively few Jewish inhabitants
prior to these massive border changes. Migrations became even more numerous after 1933 when
thousands of Jews (and their partners or family members) fled to the Balkans. Some settled whereas
others were only in transit. Many were stuck when Yugoslavia and Greece were invaded in 1941 and
brutally murdered. Others survived war years in the Balkan highlands or Adriatic islands hiding or
joining local resistance movements. Historiography on the Jewish refugees in the Balkans is patchy at
best because of the lack of traditional historical sources or biases in national historiographies and
Holocaust studies. Many survivors however left their testimonies describing in detail their experience
and the apparent paradox of the European backwaters and its peoples, offering refuge to people escaping
from the very capitals of European culture and civilisation. (Vienna, Prague, Berlin). For years I have
been reconstructing and understanding this segment of the Holocaust and World War Two history in
the Balkans by piecing together a complex puzzle of evidence scattered across countries and languages
and connecting it to personal memoirs or so-called narrative and/or literary sources.
My research is the first attempt to analyze and situate this large body of literary and
historiographical works. In this paper I will look at their everyday experiences in the Balkans and how
their perceptions of European, Balkan and Jewish identity were affected and how were these shifts
reflected in their contemporary writings and subsequent recording and memorialization of their escape,
survival or annihilation.

Biography: Bojan Aleksov obtained his doctorate in history from CEU, followed by the Humboldt
fellowship at the FU in Berlin and Max Weber fellowship at the European University Institute in
Florence. Since 2007 he teaches at the University College London where he is now a senior lecturer in
the History of south-eastern Europe, based at its School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

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 Disabled Refugees and Disabling Displacement: International Norms and Local Realities

Monika Baár
University of Leiden

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA),
of the 1 billion people living with disabilities around the world, about 20 million are affected by conflict
or disaster, and an estimated 6.7 million have been forcibly displaced from their homes. The experience
of displacement and dispossession are related to disability in multifarious ways. For one thing, persons
with disabilities have increased vulnerability during periods of displacement. For another, displacement
is often a disabling experience itself –both physically and mentally – although preparedness can reduce
the number of people who acquire new disabilities. Groups with vulnerabilities, including women,
children, people in old age, are particularly exposed to the potentially disabling effect of displacement.
For example, due to their isolation and lack of access to protection, women and children have a higher
exposure to the risk of emotional, physical and sexual violence.
Considering these pivotal aspects, is may appear surprising that the issue of disability- inclusive
practices has emerged on the agenda of UN and its affiliated agencies, humanitarian organizations,
governments and NGOs only relatively recently. This happened in parallel with the integration of
disability within the framework of human rights, which culminated in the Convention on the Rights of
Persons with Disabilities (2006). Taking as its case study the situation of disabled Syrian refugees in
Jordan and Lebanon, the proposed paper analyzes the recently formulated theories, polices and practices
of disability-inclusive refugee regimes.
It focuses on the theoretical-legal frameworks, the everyday realities and the gap between the
two. For example, it addresses problems such as the lack of rehabilitation opportunities, the interruption
in the ongoing medical treatment and financial matters. Last but not least, it emphasizes the need to
consider disabled refugees not as passive objects, but as resourceful subjects of refugee management.

Biography: Monika Baár is Professor of Central European Studies in the Institute for History at Leiden
University. Her latest research is on the contemporary history of disability from a human rights
perspective, including displacement and humanitarian emergencies. She has special interest in the
history of groups with vulnerabilities. She is principal investigator of the European Research Council-
funded research project Rethinking Disability: the Global Impact of the International Year of Disabled
Persons (1981) in Historical Perspective. On the basis of archival research (UN, WHO and UNHCR
archives among others) she is studying the process whereby the concept of disability has become
integrated into humanitarian discourses on displacement. Among her recent publications is the article
‘De-pathologizing Disability: Politics, Culture and Identity’, Neue Politische Literatur, 62 (2017), and
the chapter ‘Singing and Painting Global Awareness: International Years and Human Rights at the
United Nations’, Heidi Tworek, Jonas Bredenbach, Martin Herzer (eds.), Communicating International
Organizations in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Routledge, 2018).

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 Transitional Boundaries: Balkan/Middle Eastern Post-state Refugees and a New Regime of
Plunder

Isa Blumi
Stockholm University

A number of events that are of long as well as immediate term importance to the shaping of the
modern world's management of boundaries took place along the frontiers of the former Ottoman Empire
during the 1912-1939 period. The scale of demographic upheaval within what I will call transitional
borderlands transformed the legal, political, and socioeconomic ways post-Ottoman states in Southern
Arabia and SE Europe delineated power. The unmanageable flux of migrants induced by imperial
collapse (and often corresponding state construction), both threatened and animated the capacities of
state as it pertained to organizing (or exploiting) borderlands formed by this process. In other words,
efforts to regulate boundaries distinguishing conflicted claims of authority (and rights of exploitation)
had direct consequences on issues of political, legal, commercial, and public health importance.

Considering the various stakeholders engaged in this transitional story may prove relevant to
current events, I argue the experiences of forcefully uprooted/settled communities created new kinds of
tensions between the migrants themselves, state officials, and local populations often forced to
accommodate them. The tensions are evident throughout the larger areas directly linked to the newly
established frontier zones of post-Ottoman states in Arabia and the Balkans. As new conditions
demanded new methods of interaction between states and subjects, this paper will suggest the confusion,
tension, and ever-changing adaptations ultimately resulted in opportunities of empowerment for a large
range of previously obscure set of actors inside both state bureaucracies and local communities. This
paper aims to show that the management of refugees who settled along frontier areas ultimately created
the conditions for entirely new kinds of regulatory regimes introduced to police now strategically
critical border areas.

Biography: Author of 6 monographs, including Ottoman Refugees (2013) and Destroying Yemen
(2018), Isa Blumi works on transitional regimes emerging out of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse and
the global history of capitalism, using the prism of state formation, and political economy of refugee
migration.

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Displacement, dispossession and forced migration: how the refugee crisis transforms the Middle
East

Billie Jeanne Brownlee

University of Exeter

The 21st century will go down in history as the ‘century of displacement’ for the unprecedented
levels of forced migrants displaced across international borders or within national ones (IDPs).
Although displacement has been a transformative force of the modern world, including in the history
of the Middle East, the past fifteen years are testimony to an epochal – and epoch-defying – inflow of
forced migrants. The wars in Syria and Iraq have produced the greatest share of the Middle East’s
refugees in recent years, but many more have fled wars and failed states in Afghanistan, South Sudan,
Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. Neighbouring states have faced severe challenges in absorbing millions of
refugees, while North African states and Turkey have emerged as key transit hubs for refugee flows
into Europe. Yet, if one looks back, the 20th century was the ‘refugee century’ because the figure of the
refugee dominated that period from the outbreak of the First World War onward. With this in mind, this
paper questions what distinguishes the current wave of forced migrants from that of the past century,
what makes it a ‘crisis’ like no other, and what the effect of this human magnitude, embodied in the
movement of refugees, for the making of the contemporary Middle East is. By going beyond the human,
economic and political costs, the paper analyses some less obvious ways in which these refugee flows
are transforming the nature of states, national sovereignty, and the social fabric. It does so in a
transnational fashion, analysing factors such as the waning of state sovereignty as an effect of the
‘thickening’ of borders; the semi-permanent presence of international organisations and aid workers;
the challenge of extra-territorial political activism among refugee communities; the growth of an
underclass of disenfranchised citizens, unschooled, stateless pushed to the margins of society; and lastly
the cost of securitising the refugee crisis, where urgent or extreme measures by the state are deemed
justifiable. The paper is based on a combination of fieldwork research carried out in Lebanon, Turkey,
and Jordan as well as data collection based on policy reports and interviews with public officials and
international consultants.

Biography: Billie Jeanne Brownlee is lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter. In
2017 she was awarded the Global Challenges Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral
Fellowship to work on refugee crisis management at municipal level in the context of Lebanon. In 2018
she organised a symposium on ‘Migration: displacement and development in the MENA region’ at the
University of Exeter, which will be published as a Special Issue. Beside her research interest in forced
migration, she has been working on other pressing issues like protest movements, civil society activism,
democracy assistance and digital media in the Middle East.

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 Global Mobility and Forced Migration as Normalcy,

Nergis Canefe
York University, Canada

This paper presents a critical analysis of world mass migrations triggered by acute political
violence and wars, taking a longue durée historical perspective, including north-north, south-south, and
south-north migrations. Taking into consideration two centuries of global mobility, assessing its impact
on the migrants themselves as well as on the histories of nation-state formation, the paper focuses on
two great migration waves: the first, from the 1820s to the beginning of World War I, when forced
immigration was largely unrestricted and often orchestrated by the very states themselves; the second,
post-WWII period, when mass migration continued to grow despite policy restrictions and
developments in international law solidifying the nation-state system. The paper posits that
contemporary debates about mass forced migration must be informed by a comprehensive historical
perspective, despite changing parameters of both these movements and their reception. The starting
point for this analysis is the critical examination of the dominant perception of ‘migration as a problem’
or ‘as an exception’. This is followed by a discussion on some of the key obstacles to wholesome
theoretical formulations in migration studies. Although a singular theory of migration is neither possible
nor desirable, re-embedding migration research in a more general understanding of contemporary
societies and their histories and linking it to broader theories of social change across the globe is a must.
A conceptual framework for migration studies should therefore take social and political transformation
as its central category, and strive to facilitate an understanding of the complexity, interconnectedness,
variability and contextuality of migratory processes. No doubt, examining the multiple ways in which
migration relates to social change is a daunting task. It requires delimiting the scope of analysis to
certain types of migration and not others. This paper focuses particularly on patterns of forced migration
as an exemplary exercise of such a commitment to truly contextualize and in the end, ‘normalize’ global
migration.

Biography: Nergis Canefe a scholar trained in the fields of Political Philosophy, Forced Migration
Studies and International Public Law with special focus on Human Rights and state-society relations.
She has over twenty years of experience in carrying out in-depth qualitative research with displaced
communities and teaching human rights and public law globally. Her research experience includes
working with the Muslim and Jewish Diasporas in Europe and North America, refugees and displaced
peoples in Turkey, Cyprus, India, Uganda, South Africa, Bosnia and Colombia. She worked as the
Associate Director of Center for Refugee Studies, York University between 2008-2013. Currently she
is an executive committee member of the IASFM (international association for the study of forced
migration).

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 The Never-ending Story of a Town: Human Displacement and Dispossession
in Crete-Rethymno, 1923-2019

Melis Cankara
University of Crete

Crete, due to its strategic importance, changed hands several times and as a result, has witnessed
mass displacement in diverse contexts that formed and changed it spatially. The proposed study
considers mass displacement as an important factor that has determined the formation and change of
Crete spatially in the case of Rethymno. It will examine the spatial changes of Rethymno caused by
human displacement and dispossession in two frameworks. The first one is the spatial consequences of
the mandatory population exchange that took place between Greece and Turkey in 1923. The properties
which could not be moved together with people who were forced into migration continued to produce
cultural value and to exist in cities that were subjected to population exchange. The second part of the
study will focus on the spatial changes in Rethymno caused by the evergrowing use of Airbnb in the
last five years which has affected the city's housing supply and affordability. Moreover, the increasing
Airbnb use is currently contributing a wave of gentrification which seems to cause a new displacement
in the city.
The main sources of this study are the exchange catalogues for Rethymnon that were created
by the Institute for Mediterranean Studies using the archives of the population exchange commission,
and partly published online; Rethymno Municipality records between 1900-1927 and 1927-1940; the
output of the author’s fieldwork between the years 2013-2019 in Rethymno.
The proposed study, dealing with the various forms of human displacement and its spatial
consequences in Rethymno during the last century, is an attempt to remind us that we are faced with
the danger of being displaced at any time in this world. It is impossible to be indifferent to human
displacement and dispossession. After all, “The homeland will be when we are all strangers”.

Biography: Melis Cankara is an architect and researcher specialized in history and theory of
architecture. Between 2014-2016 she worked as a part time instructor at Özyeğin University. She
completed her PhD studies in history and theory of architecture at Yıldız Technical University with her
dissertation titled “The Silent Witnesses of The Population Exchange: The Buildings of Crete-
Rethymno that Changed Hands with the Treaty of Lausanne”. After completing her PhD studies, she
joined SALT Research as senior archivist. She is currently an Alexander S. Onassis fellow conducting
her post-doc research at the University of Crete, Department of History and Archeology.

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Humanitarian relief in the aftermath of the Great War: NER and local relief committees in the
service of the orphans in Greece,

Eleftheria Daleziou
American School of Classical Studies, Athens

The Great War was a catastrophe for humanity. The scale of human sacrifices, the suffering of
those who survived but were forced to abandon their homes, the need to offer help and support gave an
unprecedented boost to humanitarian organizations. The Near East Relief for example, was one of the
many humanitarian organizations which established and operated relief programs in the region of the
Near and Middle East. Following the end of the Greek-Turkish War in 1922 and the ensuing influx of
refugees, humanitarian organizations continued offering their help to Greece. With the Treaty of
Lausanne in 1923 1.2.million Greeks evacuated their homes in Asia Minor while 400,000 Turks were
also forced to do the same leaving their homes in Greece.
The current presentation intends to discuss the response of the people who were recruited by
relief organizations and committees to offer their services in many places, from different posts and
across borders. It will attempt to do that by focusing on the examples of two Americans from different
backgrounds who offered their relief services in different capacities in Greece. The paper draws its
material primarily from the correspondence of NER worker Dorothy Horrax Sutton and the personal
papers of archaeologist Bert Hodge Hill, at the time Director of the American School of Classical
Studies at Athens, who offered his services to the Athens American Relief Committee. The latter was a
local relief committee which served as a platform for organizing the help offered by American citizens
residing in Athens. The material of the current presentation is part of a work in progress under the title
“Relief and philanthropic work in interwar Greece by American and British organizations and
charities.”

Biography: Eleftheria Daleziou is a historian and trained archivist with a B.A. in History, an M.Phil.,
and a Ph.D. in Modern History from the University of Glasgow. She also earned an M.Litt. in
Archives and Records Management from the University of Dundee. She is currently employed as an
archivist at the Archives of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece. Her research
interests focus on the interwar years and she is currently engaged in research on relief and
philanthropic work in interwar Greece by American and British organizations and charities.

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 Refugees/ Migrants’ Access to Health in Hosting Countries:
Politics of Adaptability, Enactment of Slow Death and Inevitability of Pain,

Nouran El-Hawary
University of Saint-Joseph

Refugees/ asylum seekers/ migrants accessed medical services through UNHCR and its
partnering organizations that proved inadequate, inefficient and unsustainable in meeting their heath
needs of refugees, or/ and accelerating their vulnerability and disadvantage. Recent global heath trends
favor inclusive practices that entail primary health care, as main gateway to assure equitable access to
all. In case of refugees, it has been known as ‘Mainstreaming of Refugees/ Migrants in Public Health’.
It was adapted by several host countries like Egypt and Morocco that already have many development
challenges. While the trend is extremely ideal in principle, refugees/ migrants’ access to proper and
sufficient healthcare is not fully realized in practice. Mainly poor health infrastructure that also
‘citizens’ suffer from- among other factors- hinder refugees’ access to health. In this context, refugees
are not only vulnerable to illness and death, but also more likely to undergo pain, violence as well as
feelings of disrespect and humiliation. That actually might even shrink the refugees/ migrants’ ability
to cultivate alternative pathways of self-medication to subvert the lacking in the official health systems.
The paper contends with new migration health policy through an ethnography that focuses on refugees
and migrants of Morocco (with a comparison of Egypt) and their every day experience with health
system that unfold policy implementation, discursive claims and complex interactions of various actors
involved; be they service providers (medical staff), state officials, or civil society representatives.
Arguably, such policies have hardened refugees and migrants lives who described that they “escaped a
death in their home of origins to die slowly here.” Yet, it succeeded in uncovering dysfunctional national
system(s) that were subject to huge disadvantage of neo-liberal policies imposed by World Bank and
IMF

Biography: Nouran El-Hawary is a Masters degree candidate in Global Campus for Human Rights
(2018-2019) at the University of Saint Joseph in Beirut.

15
 The Restructuring of East Central Europe and the Juridification of Migration 1919-1950,

Michael G. Esch
University of Leipzig

The reordering of East Central Europe after World War I resulted not only in the formation of
new nation states and the production of new kinds of political and ethnic refugees. The implementation
of the (although ethnicised) republican nation state as the hegemonic principle of statehood also
suggested solutions to refugee and – more generally – migration problems through means of national
and international positive law. It was the Russian refugees – a very mixed group of refugees from the
Bolshevik revolution and most particularly civil and interventionist war – that first became the object
of (and actors in) constructing a codified status for refugees – as well as a unified identity for this
extremely heterogeneous group that transformed it into a sort of unequivocal political topic. Their very
existence also gave birth to the first efforts of depoliticised, supranational management of refugee
matters in the UNHCR and facilitated the accreditation of NGOs as important although ambivalent
agencies.
In more than one way, these developments were mirrored by a global tendency towards
national, bilateral and international juridifications of migration regimes and towards state-sponsored
NGO interventions into migration patterns: the formation of the ILO, migration agreements between
sending and receiving countries, settlement schemes fo Jewish, Polish and Czech migrants to South
America and so on. The contribution shows these processes of institutionalisation and juridification as
part of a global expansion of state control over territory and population and present its ambivalent
impacts on migration patterns.

Biography: Michael G Esch does research in Social and Cultural History. He currently works as a
translator, part-time musician and as a researcher at the Centre for the History and Culture of East
Central Europe, University of Leipzig. Their current project is 'Handbuch einer transnationalen
Geschichte Ostmitteleuropas' where he is specialised on migration history. Michael also works on the
social, cultural and political history of Jazz, Beat and Rock in a transnational, global perspective.

16
 Forced migrations and people’s states after World War I

Antonio Ferrara,
National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes ANVUR, Rome

After WWI, several ‘successor states’ were established on East Central European and Middle
Eastern territories once controlled by dynastic empires. Some of those states displaced and dispossessed
entire populations they saw as ‘alien’ ones: the Greco-Turkish population exchange sanctioned by the
convention of Lausanne is only the best-known of several episodes of forcible migrations that took
place all over the region between the Baltic and Adriatic seas to the west and the Chinese border to the
east.
Yet there is – to my knowledge – no systematic, overall study of these episodes, even if they
took place mostly at the same time; separate historiographies have not interacted with each other much,
partly as a result of an organization of academic knowledge segmented into different ‘area studies’ and
distinct ‘national (or imperial) histories’. Thus this paper will, first of all, propose an overview of the
cases of forced migrations that took place in the immediate aftermath of World War I (1917-23), hinting
at how such episodes somehow prefigured later ones that would take place not just in Europe but also
all over the world as the West European maritime empires crumbled. In doing so, it will also try to
problematize the connection between forced migrations on one hand and the establishment of ‘people’s
states’ on the other, arguing for the need to examine such a connection in a long-term perspective
starting well before 1919.

Biography: Antonio Ferrara works since 2014 as an evalution expert at the National Agency for the
Evaluation of Universities and Research Insitutes ANVUR in Rome, Italy.

17
 Refugees, migrations and the rise of populism in post-Cold War Eastern Europe

Guido Franzinetti
University of Eastern Piedmont

The rise of xenophobic attitudes in Eastern Europe is usually treated in isolation from the
broader political, social and economic contexts. The historical background is used as the default
explanation. The aim of this paper is to analyse the wider context in which the successive refugee crises
interacted in Eastern Europe.
The end of the Cold War and the opening of borders series of distinct issues of redefinition of
citizenship legislation, connected to the ‘return’ of people to the ‘mother country’.
The wars of Yugoslav dissolution (1991-1999) posed two urgent issues: on the one hand, the
redefinition of post-Yugoslav citizenships; on the other, the outflow of refugees from the Yugoslav
wars. In particular, the development of the Kosovo conflict needs to be understood in terms of a
mounting refugee crisis.
The apparent success of EU policies in dealing with the refugee and migratory crises of the
1990s left in place a system which was inadequate in dealing with the chain of crises after 2001,
culminating in the Syrian crisis.
In the case of East-central Europe, social and political reactions were strongly affected by the
‘social draining’ of labour force towards the North-Western part of the EU in societies. This has
compounded the pre-exiting demographic decline, and the mounting crisis of the pension systems. Pre-
existing xenophobia, which certainly existed, would not have been sufficient to ensure populist
victories.
The first populist wave in East-Central Europe (in the early 2000s) eventually subsided. But the
subsequent financial crash of 2008 (which destroyed the credibility of the liberal establishment),
together with the EU handling of the Syrian crisis made possible the second populist wave, which has
now extended to Southern Europe. This second wave is apparently unassailable, at least in the short and
medium term.

Biography: Guido Franzinetti is a lecturer in History of European Territories at the Department of

Humanistic Studies at the University of Eastern Piedmont, Vercelli, Italy. He has carried out research
and worked in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Kosovo.

18
 Writing refugees into the 20th century history of refugeedom

Peter Gatrell
University of Manchester

My lecture begins with the proposition that we need to think beyond the commonly accepted
framework of an international refugee regime and engage with a much broader concept that I term
‘refugeedom’, this being my translation of a word coined in Russia during the First World War, at a
time when millions of people were forced from their homes mainly in the western borderlands of the
Tsarist Empire and in parts of the Caucasus. Refugeedom drew attention not only to the scale of
unprecedented mass population displacement, but also to the practices of state and non-state actors
who did little to disguise their political agenda. In contemporary usage, the term additionally
encompassed the experiences of refugees and how those experiences were represented in public
discourse and in cultural production.
In my talk I want to suggest that ‘refugeedom’ is a matrix of extensive relationships involving
multiple actors. It holds out the possibility of rethinking a range of issues in relation to global
population displacement in the 20th century, in particular the need to acknowledge and to account for
stakeholders that do not necessarily share the same objectives. In so doing, we can take more
seriously the actions of refugees as purposeful agents and interlocutors rather than as the objects of
external intervention.
I illustrate this approach by referring to various sites of 20th century displacement, focusing
on specific historical contexts and the dynamics of refugeedom, and drawing on the excellent work of
many scholars from different disciplines. In addition to considering how refugees have been
characterised by non-refugees and what is at stake in the formulation and implementation of what
have come to be called ‘durable solutions’ to refugee crises, I want to consider the traces that refugees
left behind in the records of leading inter-governmental and non-governmental archives, and to ask
what those voices can contribute to rethinking refugee history. I shall therefore end with some
reflections prompted by having begun to consult the individual case files of refugees from the
archives of UNHCR, Geneva.

Biography: Peter Gatrell has spent much of the past 20 years studying the history of population
displacement in the modern world. His books include a trilogy on refugee history: the prize-winning
book A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War 1 (Indiana University Press,
1999); Free World? The Campaign to Save the World's Refugees, 1956-1963 (Cambridge University
Press, 2011); and The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford University Press, 2013). He recently
co-edited Europe on the Move: Refugees in the Era of the Great War (Manchester University Press,
2017). He retains an interest in the economic and social history of modern Russia to which he devoted
much of the first half of his academic career. His new book, The Unsettling of Europe: How
Migration Reshaped a Continent, a new history of Europe since 1945, seen through the lens of
migration in and to Europe, will appear with Penguin Books and Basic Books in August 2019.Peter
Gatrell has directed several research projects on population displacement, state-building and social
identity in the aftermath of the two world wars. In July 2018, he started a three-year collaborative
research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, entitled “Reckoning with
refugeedom: refugee voices in modern history, 1919 to 1975”. He is affiliated to the University of
Manchester’s Humanitarian and Conflict Research Institute (HCRI). In 2011 he was elected a Fellow
of the Academy of Social Sciences.

19
 A State without People revisited: multidimensional displacement during the great civil war,
2003-19

Maziyar Ghiabi
Wadham College, Oxford University

Billie Jeanne Brownlee

Exeter University

The past decade has seen an exceptional rise in forced displacement resulting from civil
conflicts, state-led violence, sectarian strife, and political unrest in the Middle East. The number of
displaced people has reached 25 million. When resettling elsewhere, the displaced seek to set base with
fellow members of their communities. Whether in safer zones within the borders of their own country
or resettled in neighbouring ones, displaced communities reconfigure an artificial homogeneity in the
space of resettlement. This new situation runs against the historical heterogeneity characterising the
region for several centuries. What does this human movement across nation-state borders determine
upon state formation and state-society relations? Beside undermining the edifice of the Sykes-Picot
agreement, does it prelude to a new remapping of regional domestic politics?
Scholarship on displacement and migration paid heed to the ongoing social, economic and
cultural dimensions of the mass movement of people following the ‘Arab Spring’. This gives priority
to a binary understanding of displacement politics as divided into security challenges for hosting
communities, including in Europe, or the industry of aid and humanitarian provision for ‘victim’
communities. That leaves unexplored the effect of displacement on the political transformations of the
Middle East and its paradigms of government today. This paper addresses this void in the scholarship
by taking inspiration from Giorgio Agamben’s invitation to look at civil wars as a moment of
reconstitution of contemporary politics. The hypothesis is that, following a global turn, states in the
Middle East are turning into states without people.

Biography: Maziyar Ghiabi is an Italian-Iranian social scientist, ethnographer and historian, currently
a lecturer at the University of Oxford and Titular Fellow at Wadham College. Prior to this position, he
was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paris School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) and a
member of the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire des Enjeux Sociaux (IRIS). He obtained his
Doctorate in Politics at the University of Oxford (St Antony’s College) where he was a Wellcome Trust
Scholar in Society and Ethics (2013–2017). His first monograph book, Drugs Politics, is published by
Cambridge University Press (2019). He has also edited the Special Issue on ‘Drugs, Politics and Society
in the Global South’ published by Third World Quarterly. His interest falls at the crossroads of different
disciplinary and intellectual fields, from medical anthropology (addicted lives), politics (crisis and state
formation), to modern social history across the Middle East and Mediterranean. His contributions come
in different languages, including English, French, Italian, Persian, Arabic, and Portuguese.

20
 Educational Pathways: Refugee Learners and Writing-Based Approaches in the Tertiary
Classroom

Rebecca Granato
Bard College

In the wake of the Syrian crisis, educational projects have cropped up all over the Middle East,
with the intention of saving the youth from a future of ignorance and the world from the potential threat
of millions of unoccupied youth roaming the streets in host countries. In the tertiary sector, degree-
granting and informal programs are run by universities, NGO’s and other implementing partners, and
not without a significant number of impediments to reaching the target populations. So, too, the
potential students themselves face a number of issues in accessing programming, but also in translating
the courses they can take into clear pathways towards full degree programs or employment. This paper
will explore contemporary educational offerings in the MENA region that target Syrians and other
displaced populations, with a particular focus on programs emphasizing a liberal arts approach, in which
students participate in interdisciplinary and student-centered classes. The paper will argue that writing-
based education that employs low stakes writing offers refugee learners a pathway towards future
learning by accounting for psycho-social challenges, different preparation levels and high rates of
attrition. The paper will draw on data from Bard’s programming in the West Bank and Jordan.

Biography: Rebecca Granato is the Associate Vice President for Global Initiatives at Bard College and
the Dean of Academic Outreach at Bard’s partnership program, Al-Quds Bard College in East
Jerusalem. Dr. Granato is a project lead for Bard College on its educational programming for refugee
learners, which currently offers student-centered connected learning classes in Germany and Jordan,
and is working towards a certificate for clustered offerings in the MENA region and the horn of Africa.
She has also been an Associate of Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking since 2004, in
which capacity she has developed and delivered faculty trainings at Bard’s international partnership
programs, including to secondary school teachers at Bard College in Annandale, Mandalay and Yangon
Universities in Myanmar, European Humanities University in Lithuania, the American University of
Central Asia in Bishkek, as well as at other institutions around Palestine and in Jordan. Her current
professional emphases include developing programs and partnerships to benefit students and teachers
in refugee communities in the MENA region. After undergraduate and graduate studies at Bard College,
Exeter College, Oxford, and CUNY, she received her PhD in Global History from the interdisciplinary
and intercampus program based at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. She’s currently
working on a book about Palestinian political prisoners and the evolution of educational and political
structures inside the prisons in the 1970s and 1980s.

21
 ‘Abject creatures’: Palestinian women and the struggle for a future in the camps of Lebanon

Maria Holt
University of Westminster

In 1948, the majority of Arab Palestinians fled from their homeland as the state of Israel came
into being. Approximately 110,000 refugees took up what they imagined would be temporary residence
in neighbouring Lebanon. However, in the ensuing 71 years. their presence has become more
permanent. They remain a disadvantaged community, unwanted by the host government and unable to
return home.
The term ‘refugee’ evokes ‘out-of-place victims’ or ‘incapacitated objects of rescue’ (Espiritu
2016); the refugee is regarded as ‘the most abject creature of all’ (Nayeri 2018). Palestinian refugee
camps in Lebanon are characterized as constituting a ‘space of exception, a space out of place under
disciplinary power, control and surveillance’ (Agamben 2005, Hanafi 2008) or as ‘melancholy places
of exile and oppression’ (Weingrod and Levy 2005). But I think these imaginings fail to do justice to
Palestinians in exile; they mask a quite different reality. The camps are ‘landscapes of despair’ but also
of hope (Peteet 2005). From my experience of talking to large numbers of Palestinian women over
many years, I heard about an extraordinarily rich diversity of experiences. Their stories reveal joy, hope,
resilience and determination. Like refugee women in other contexts and geographical locations,
Palestinian women in Lebanon have sought to translate ‘unknown, dangerous areas into known safe
places’ (Hammond 2004).
Building on critical refugee studies, I will seek to conceptualize ‘the refugee woman’ not as ‘an
object of rescue’ but ‘as a site of social and political critiques’ (Espiritu 2016). My paper will focus on
the ways in which women in the camps of Lebanon have used home-making as a way of remembering
their lost homeland but also in order to construct a tolerable future. I will argue that, in contrast to ‘new
diaspora’ discourses, Palestinian resistance to exile has created a political community that insists on its
right of return.

Biography: Maria Holt is a Reader in Middle East Politics in the Department of Politics & International
Relations, University of Westminster (London). Her research interests include Palestinian refugees in
Lebanon; women and Islamic resistance in the Arab world; women, violence and conflict in the Middle
East; and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Recent publications include ‘Muslim women and (in)security: a
Palestinian paradox’, in Routledge Handbook on Middle East Security, edited by Anders Jagerskog,
Michael Schulz and Ashok Swain, London: Routledge, 2019. ‘Everyday Practices of Sacrifice: A Case
Study of Palestinian Women’, Gender and Research, Volume 19, Number 1, 2018, Women and conflict
in the Middle East: Palestinian refugees and the response to violence, London: I B Tauris, 2014,
Women, Islam, and resistance in the Arab world (with Haifaa Jawad), Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2013.
She is currently working on a project entitled ‘Violence against Arab Women in Peace and War’.

22
 Refuge in the ‘Homeland’ – the Syrians in Armenia

Sossie Kasbarian
University of Sterling

This paper looks at the contemporary case of Syrian Armenians taking refuge/ migrating to
Armenia. The Syrian Civil war has led to the worst humanitarian crisis of the century and the number
of Syrians fleeing the conflict has now surpassed four million. Among these are Syrian Armenians,
previously numbered around 90,000, many of whom have (been) relocated to Armenia. From the
outbreak of the violence in 2011 the wealthier among them started setting up alternative (temporary)
homes in Armenia, with the idea that they would return to Syria once things had died down. Since then,
increasing numbers of Syrians have had no choice but to move to Armenia, many in desperate situations.

This paper looks at the different local, national and international actors involved with dealing
with the Syrian humanitarian crisis in Armenia. It engages with their discourse, narratives, policies and
practice, and crucially how these are being played out on the ground. The chapter is based on field
research in Armenia in November 2016, and subsequent follow up research. It looks at how international
organisations like the UNHCR as well as diaspora institutions like the Armenian General Benevolent
Union (AGBU) are tackling the Syrian refugee crisis in Armenia. It also situates these activities in
relation to how the Armenian government is dealing with the Syrians. In addition, the paper examines
the crucial role played by local civil society groups set up by Syrian Armenians in Armenia.

The Syrian Armenians are the latest significant wave of diasporan Armenians seeking refuge
from troubled homes. While it is yet unclear how many of these refugees will stay in Armenia long-
term, this paper also addresses the problematic concepts and realities of diasporan ‘home’, ‘homeland’
and ‘return’, within the Armenian state and society.

Biography: Sossie Kasbarian is Senior Lecturer (Associate Lecturer) in Comparative Politics at the
University of Stirling. Sossie’s research interests and publications broadly span diaspora studies;
contemporary Middle East politics and society; nationalism and ethnicity; transnational political
activism; refugee and migration studies. She is co-editor of the journal Diaspora- A Journal of
Transnational Studies. Her current work is a comparative study of the different trajectories that
transnational communities in the contemporary Middle East embody and enact, focusing on the
Armenian diaspora.

23
 Displacement and community survival after genocide: The Yazidi perspective

Zeynep Kaya
London School of Economics

The experience of displacement after persecution is not a new phenomenon for the Yazidi community,
a community that lives in the Sinjar district of Mosul and Bashika district of Duhok in northern Iraq.
Yazidis’ most recent experience of displacement took place after the brutal attacks against this
community in August 2014 by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). A community of not more
than half a million, Yazidis faced destruction in these attacks. 10,000 Yazidis were killed, thousands
of Yazidi women and girls were taken hostage and experienced sexual violence in the hands of ISIS,
and Yazidi boys were forcefully recruited as ISIS fighters. Most of the Yazidis who survived the
attacks now live in displacement camps across Iraqi Kurdistan and several of them have taken refuge
in western countries such as Germany and Australia. Today, the Yazidis are a traumatised community
with concerns about their future existence. This paper provides an analysis of the impact of genocide-
related displacement on a religious minority group such as the Yazidis. It relies on about 40
interviews conducted in May and June 2018 with Yazidis in Iraq and around 30 interviews with local
and international experts and civil society organisation representatives who carry out humanitarian
work involving the Yazidi community. The paper shows that Yazidis’ concerns about survival as a
community and their future existence in Iraq is related to the attacks they faced, but the more long-
term concern is their dispersal. Findings indicate that Yazidis do not see a future in Iraq for their
community and are concerned in maintaining their community cohesion and identity in the face of
displacement.

Biography: Zeynep is a Research Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. She is part of the UK DFID-
Funded Conflict Research Programme and is leading projects on gendered drivers of conflict in Iraq,
the impact of genocide on the Yazidi community, internal displacement Iraq, WPS and displacement
in the Middle East, and women’s political participation in Kuwait. She is also a Lecturer at the
Pembroke-King’s Programme, University of Cambridge. Zeynep’s wider research interests are in the
international politics of the Middle East with a focus on Kurds, gender and conflict in Iraq, Syria and
Turkey, as well as Turkish domestic politics and foreign relations. She has a PhD in International
Relations from LSE and her book Mapping Kurdistan: Self-determination, Territoriality and the
Quest for Statehood is in print with the Cambridge University Press.

24
 Ghurba as a Personal Matter:
Connotations of “Ghurba” in Al-Tantouriah & I Saw Ramallah

Alaa Ahmad Kayali

American University of Beirut

This paper studies the subject of Ghurba in Al-Tantouriah, a novel by Radwa Ashour, in
comparison with I Saw Ramallah, a novel by Mourid Barghouti. It focuses on the Reader-writer
relationship in the two novels, and searches for signs of recalling memories and feelings related to them;
nostalgia, loneliness and alienation. I look into Ashour’s methods of forming these feelings and as a
result making her way into shaping the characters of her novel as individuals distinct from a Palestinian
persona commonly found in literature. I look for elements of characterization; feelings and memories
to start with. I aim in this paper to compare elements of characterization in Al-Tantouriah, as a narrative
fiction, and I Saw Ramallah, as an autobiography.

I study Ghurba as an act of memory, thus an act of individual, not a collective, memory of
Ashour’s characters and the character of Barghouti in his previous work. Ghurba in this sense is a
distinct feeling which differs from one to another, thus it is not a collective-shared feeling between
people of a homeland. Dealing with Ghurba from this perspective opens the door to analyzing previous
works in light of personal memories and experiences of the characters. I search the novels for signs of
memories, cultural beliefs, feelings, and more importantly I look into the development of these
memories and beliefs and their place in the picture of Palestinian people in literature. How do those
memories grow in the perspective of their owners along with the ghurba experience and the new
encountered cultures?
This paper aims to distinguish between what is common (collective) and what is peculiar (personal)
memories in relation to reader-writer and reader-characters relationships. This allows us to understand
the literary Palestinian persona in depth, as it gives us a glimpse on the way to understanding ghurba as
a literary element of Palestinian literature. Furthermore, it deals with ghurba as a personal matter; a
matter that bears different connotations for each and every literary character or person.

Biography: Alaa Ahmad Kayali is a master’s student at the department of Arabic and Near Eastern
languages. He earned my bachelor’s degree in Arabic literature from the same department. His research
interests include topics related to Abbasid prose, specifically in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries. His
focal point lies in the intellectual variety which existed in the Islamic world at the time, specifically the
multicultural backgrounds of the writers of that time and their universal worldview as well as their
humanistic and universal conceptions of adab, wisdom, morality, sciences and religion. He tries to look
into the Abbasid literature through placing literary texts in the intellectual, cultural, and philosophical
context of that period. He is also interested in translation, specifically in the field of Qur’anic studies
and theology.

25
 Those who left and those who stayed. Diasporic “brothers” seen as the “new others” in the
Bosnian context

Dragana Kovacevic Bielicki

University of Oslo

The Bosnian war (1992-1995) caused at the time largest forced displacement of people in
Europe since the end of World War II. This paper explores the division into diaspora and homeland
dwellers in the context of post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. More specifically, the interest is on the
constructed otherness of perceived co-ethnics who left because of the armed conflict (leavers) in relation
to those who stayed (stayers). It is argued here that the division into stayers and leavers presents one of
the most prominent among non-ethnically framed divisions in this post-war society. The argument is
based on author´s two qualitative research projects, conducted between 2011 and 2016. The narratives
selected to support the main claim of the article come out of thirty-five interviews with people who
experienced displacement, out of which twenty interviews were conducted with people who remain
resettled abroad (diaspora) and fifteen interviews involved people who repatriated after many years of
living abroad (returnees). The case study provides the opportunity to explore otherness that the
interviewed people experience from their co-ethnics, as one of the societal divisions that is based on
experiential and socio-economic differences. This type of division can to a great degree challenge the
perceived strong ethnic solidarities and identifications among people who reside in and originate from
Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Biography: Dragana Kovacevic Bielicki is a social researcher focusing mainly on forced migration,
nationalism, and belonging in discourse. Based in Norway since 2009, she received a PhD in Migration,
Nationalism and Culture Studies in 2016 from the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo. A
monograph based on her doctoral research was published in 2017 with the title Born in Yugoslavia-
Raised in Norway: Former Child Refugees and Belonging (Oslo, Novus Press, 2017). In addition, she
holds degrees from Central European University (MA, Nationalism Studies) and the University of
Belgrade (BA, Philosophy). She is a returning lecturer for the Peace Scholars program at the
International Summer School, University of Oslo. During spring 2019, she is a Postdoctoral Visiting
Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Rijeka.

26
 “Turkey and the management of refugees from Greece during the Second World War”

Alexandros Lamprou
University of Ankara

Based on archival research in Turkey and Greece, this paper studies the displacement of more
than 60.000 people from Greece to Turkey and the Middle East during World War II. Starting with a
presentation of the geography, statistics and timeframe of the displacement, the paper turns to the
management of the displaced by Turkey. To do so it first broadly presents Turkey’s interwar
demographic policies, arguing that it was within their confines that its wartime refugee policies were
shaped. Yet, the war conjuncture as well as the dynamics of its relations with the warrying countries
altered the way Turkey managed the displaced throughout the war. This paper thus argues that the
policies of refugee management were not consistent. Rather, they were, on the one hand, shaped within
the specific context of the state’s demographic policies and they were thus differentiated on account of
ethnic and religious criteria. On the other hand, though, they were increasingly conditioned by the
military, political and diplomatic conjuncture of the war. Because of this conditionality, the refugee
management and its rationale shifted drastically during the war. It was this conditionality that explains,
for example, the shifts in the way Jewish and Christian refugees, but also Muslims from Greece were
handled by Turkey: in the conjuncture of 1941-2 and in contrast to its policy until then, Turkey
naturalized more than 10.000 displaced Thracian Muslims, while in 1944-5, it had the displaced
Muslims from the Dodecanese send back to their homes in the islands as soon as it became possible.

Biography: Alexandros Lamprou studied History and Ethnology (BA, 2000 Democritus University of
Thrace), Middle Eastern History (MA, 2001 Manchester University) and Turkish History (PhD 2009,
Leiden University). He is currently teaching Modern Greek history and Turkish-Greek Comparative
history at the Faculty of Languages, History and Geography, Ankara University. He has formerly taught
Modern Turkish History at the University of Crete. His research interests include state-society relations,
social engineering projects and petitioning. For the last years he has been doing research on the
population displacement from Greece to Turkey and the Middle East during the Second World War. In
2018 he carried out a postdoctoral research project and organized a conference on this topic.

27
 The global governance of refugee protection
Humanitarian Programs for Displaced Armenians in the 1920s

Francesca Piana
University of Geneva

Warfare, the crumbling of multi-ethnic empires, genocide and ethnic cleansing, the making of
nation-states, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, in addition to epidemics, famine, and disrupted
economies created massive moments of combatants and civilians across Europe and the Middle East in
the aftermath of WWI. Among them were the survivors of the Armenian genocide, especially women
and children who were scattered throughout the Middle East and the South of the Caucasus and who
were in dire humanitarian conditions. During and in the aftermath of the genocide, different institutions
provided humanitarian aid to Armenians. Three of them were Geneva-based organizations, the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), League of Nations (LON), and the International
Labor Organization (ILO), which engaged in short-term relief and longer rehabilitation programs for
Armenian women and children in Istanbul and in mandated Syria and Lebanon in the 1920s. The
humanitarian programs of the three organizations was shaped by several historical processes, i.e. the
consequences of the Armenian genocide, the anti-immigration policies of some Western countries, the
scarcity of European capital and the importance of American money, as well as the need to restart
postwar economics through employment policies and state-building processes in post-Ottoman states.
With this contribution I first analyze and compare the activities of the ICRC, the LON, and the
ILO on behalf of displaced Armenians, paying attention to their mandates, internal structures, and inter-
institutional connections. Assisting and protecting Armenian refugees was more than a political or
moral call and allows the three organizations to develop institutionally, to claim legitimacy and a place
in inter-state relations. Moreover, the interactions of the ICRC, the LON, and the ILO with other
humanitarian organizations, governments, local groups, and the refugees laid the foundation for the
global governance of refugee protection. Second, I look at the negotiations that the three organizations
undertook in Geneva and at the humanitarian practices that a few relief workers implemented in the
institutions, camps, neighborhoods, and colonies where Armenian refugees were assisted and resettled.
As other historians have also claimed, the protection of Armenians built upon yet diverged from
the discourses and approaches adopted by the ICRC, the LON, and the ILO on behalf of other groups
of displaced persons, such as prisoners of war from Russia and the defeated powers, as well as Russian
refugees. In the geopolitical imagination of the international civil servants in Geneva, Istanbul or
Aleppo, assisting and resettling Armenians in the Middle East would contribute not only to their
survival as a community but would also bring peace and stability in the region and, from there, in
Europe.
Biography: Francesca Piana is a historian of European and international history. Her research and
teaching encompass internationalism, humanitarian aid and the mission, migration, and women/gender
in 20th century Europe through a transnational, comparative, and interdisciplinary perspective. From
2013 to 2016, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation at Columbia
University, the University of Michigan, and Birkbeck College. Francesca Piana is completing her first
monograph entitled ‘Humanitarianism in Practice. Europe and its Displaced Populations after World
War I’. She is also co-editing with Jo Laycock the volume ‘Aid to Armenia. Humanitarian Aid, Relief,
and Interventions from 1890s to Present’. She holds a PhD in International History and Politics from
the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.

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 “Displacement as State-Building: The Making of a Modern Middle Eastern Order”

Laura Robson
Portland State University

The Middle East has been a site of mass human displacement for more than a century, a
condition often associated with political chaos and intractable challenges to state authority. But in fact,
the refugee and migrant flows that have long characterized the region have often helped to construct
and reinforce various kinds of state authority. This talk looks at a series of examples of refugees and
migrant movement constructing state sovereignty and state borders throughout the Middle East’s “long”
twentieth century.

The late Ottoman empire was the first modern state to feature a refugee resettlement office,
which made a practice of settling refugees – mainly from the Balkans and the Caucasus – in areas of
the empire resistant to centralization and incorporation, from the Kurdish regions of Anatolia to the
Arab territory of modern-day Jordan. During the mandate period, the British and French engaged in the
practice of settling Armenian and Assyrian refugees in border regions of mandatory Iraq and Syria,
especially around Mosul and in the Jazira, as a way of laying claim to resistant territory. In the
postcolonial period, the Jordanian government placed Palestinian refugees strategically for the purposes
of sedentarization and bringing tribal areas under state control. Contemporary Israeli settlement
practices in the Palestinian territories similarly make use of migrants and settlers, though not usually
refugees, to lay a state claim to occupied land.

Refugee and migrant movement, then, has been a crucial element of creating borders, claiming
land, and territorializing space across the Middle East, from the late Ottoman period through the
mandates to the present day. Such a history suggests that human displacement is not merely a byproduct
of the modern nation-state but is in fact constitutive of it: a conclusion relevant not only to the Middle
East but to modern histories of states across the globe.

Biography: Laura Robson is a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at Portland State University
in Portland, Oregon. Her most recent books are the recently published collected volume Partitions: A
Transnational History of 20th Century Territorial Separatism (co-edited with Arie Dubnov; Stanford
University Press, 2019), which explores the emergence and consequences of the political “solution” of
partition in the twentieth century world, and States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making
of the Modern Middle East (University of California Press, 2017), which explores the history of forced
migration, population exchange, and refugee resettlement in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine during the
interwar period. She is also the author of Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine (University
of Texas Press, 2011) and editor of Minorities and the Modern Arab World: New Perspectives (Syracuse
University Press, 2016), and her work has appeared in many leading scholarly journals, including the
International Journal of Middle East Studies and the Journal of Palestine Studies. Her research has been
supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the
Smith Richardson Foundation, among others. She holds graduate degrees from Yale University, Oxford
University, and the Royal Academy of Music.

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 Defining the Refugee in German Legal Institutions

Sophie Roche
University of Heidelberg

The German refugee law has developed along with incoming populations in recent decades.
The arrival of refugees from Syria especially since 2015 has challenged the existing system, which has
been slow to respond to the fast changing political circumstances in the Middle East and the increasing
numbers of arrivals. While the change from peace to conflict and back is a complex one in conflict
studies, for the practice of law this becomes an individual evaluation that requires detailed knowledge
difficult to acquire. In response to this problem, several Länder have created positions with the task to
answer specific legal questions regarding the country of origin situation. This task is highly complex,
as the nature of looking for a place to receive protection has considerably changed with new
technologies, information systems and political regimes. Being responsible to build up the Asylum
Documentation Center in one of the federal states of Germany, I am experiencing the struggle of
institutions to cope with the changing nature of what a refugee is in today’s world and Syria is
dominating the discourse in this matter and currently our primary concern. This contribution will reflect
how legal institutions struggle in meeting all criteria that define refugee’s legal rights and international
standards and the political and social discourses that shape the current legal practice.

Biography: Social anthropologist Sophie Roche works on conflicts and environmental disasters in
Central Asia, Iran and Germany. She is specialized in the social and political history and ethnography
of Central Asia. She has conducted research on migrants from Central Asia in Russia and from the
Middle East in Germany with particular interest in the role of Islam among migrants. She received her
PhD from the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and her habilitation degree at the Ruprecht
Karls University of Heidelberg. She has been a research fellow at several research centres in Germany
including the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, the Centre for the Study of the Modern
Orient (Zentrum Moderner Orient) in Berlin, the Heidelberg Cluster for Transcultural Studies as well
as deputy professor at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. She has been awarded visiting scholarships
by the Institute d’études de l’islam et des sociétés du monde musulman (IISMM) and the Fondation
Maison Science de l’Homme (FMSH) both in Paris. Currently she is establishing the Asylum
Documentation Centre for the Federal State of Baden-Württemberg and conducts research on relevant
countries of origins, primarily Syria. She authored two monographs, several edited volumes and more
than forty articles and book chapters.

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 What is Wrong with Integration Policies and Processes? Examples from EU and Turkey in a
Comparative Perspective

Şahizer Samuk Carignani

University of Luxembourg

The discussion regarding the integration of Syrians in Turkey most often suggests that
integration policies are not at place and even if they are at place, they are not sufficient. On the other
hand, the temporariness of their settlement in legislation and state policies are still evident. When we
look at the integration (after the 2014-2017 refugee flows) of the resettled refugees in European
countries, the numbers are much smaller, but the integration policies are quite intense and demanding.
On the other hand, there is a common belief and tendency to start integration first and foremost from
labour market integration: a common belief is that once migrants have jobs they will be integrated more
easily, which controversially can also be a period where most of the immigrants go deskilled. For
instance, Turkey also achieved great steps with the Regulation on Work Permits of Foreigners under
Temporary Protection, no. 29594 that allows refugees to work in 2016. However, my paper aims to
critically analyze the change towards perspectives on integration policies in Europe and Turkey (from
diverging and converging aspects) in the last eight to ten years. Converging perspective is that they are
both following more of a North American tradition that the migrants are seen as potential laborers. The
idea that existence of a job provides refugees a meaningful life might not be always true from a
theoretical and practical perspective. Especially refugees who experience the tests of deservingness and
possessing sufficient “vulnerability” to gain more rights, still long for peace in their home countries and
many of them rescale their capacities (they might also see themselves as temporary, regardless of laws).
In fact, the interviews with highly skilled young Syrians in Turkey reveal that they do not aim to gain
citizenship as they have a complicated view of integration and citizenship.

Biography: Şahizer Samuk Carignani had her BA in Political Science and International Relations
from Boğaziçi University, had two masters, one on International Relations from Koç University and
one from Luiss Guido Carli University on European Studies. She worked for International
Organisation for Migration in Istanbul for one year on an anti-trafficking project. After having
graduated from IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, with her PhD thesis on “Temporary
Migration and Temporary Integration: Comparing the Cases of Canada and the UK” she worked for
IOM Ankara as a project assistant in 2016. Later, she worked as a postdoc at the University of
Luxembourg for a Horizon 2020 project called MOVE on youth mobility and hindering vs. fostering
factors of mobility. Her research interests are migration and art (visual and literary), politics and
policies of migration and refugee and migrant integration in diverse countries and contexts. She has
publications on integration of refugees, migrants, temporary migration policies, and youth mobility
in the EU.

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 The Current Middle East Refugee Crisis: World War I’s Legacy

Kent F. Schull
Binghamton University, SUNY

Currently there are over 25 million forcibly displaced persons (refugees and internally displaced
persons/IDPs) throughout the Middle East and North Africa, particularly in Iraq, Kurdistan, Libya,
Palestine, Syria, Turkey and Yemen. This is part of over 65 million forcibly displaced persons
worldwide representing the greatest global refugee crisis since World War II. The immediate causes of
the current MENA crisis include: 1) the United States’ Global War on Terror and invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq; 2) the intractable Palestinian-Israeli Conflict; 3) Turkey’s brutal counter-
insurgency against its Kurdish population; 4) the Arab Uprisings and subsequent civil wars in Libya,
Syria, and Yemen; 5) the entrenchment of Al-Qaeda and the rise of ISIS; and 6) regional rivalries and
proxy wars backed by larger geo-political struggles for power and influence in the MENA. Each
immediate cause, however, represents the latest manifestation of systemic factors entrenched by WWI
and its aftermath that have created a continuum of forced migration and dispossession in the Middle
East and North Africa. This paper argues that the current MENA refugee and IDP crisis is the net result
of an ongoing combination of Western Imperialism and Interventionism, Geo-Political and Regional
Rivalries, Nativist Nationalisms that wed access to power based with ethno-religious identity, Nation-
state Construction, and the Integration and Peripheralization of the MENA into the Global Capitalist
Economy. WWI and its immediate aftermath, particularly the Treaty of Lausanne, entrenched this toxic
cocktail in the Middle East and North Africa causing a systemic continuum of displacement and
dispossession in the MENA culminating with the current crisis.

Biography: Dr. Kent F. Schull is Associate Professor of history at Binghamton University, SUNY. He
received his doctorate from UCLA and is a twice Fulbright scholar to Turkey. His publications
include Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity (EUP, 2014), two co-edited
volumes: Living in the Ottoman Realm: Sultans, Subjects, and Elites (IUP, 2016) and Law and Legality
in the Ottoman Empire & Republic of Turkey (IUP, 2016), several articles, and book chapters. He is
currently the consulting editor of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA)
and the book series editor for Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire.

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 The Intersection between Refugee Entrepreneurship and Integration: The case of Syrian
refugees in Turkey

Doğuş Şimşek,
Koç University

Contemporary migration primarily takes place to developing countries rather than to developed
countries. Among the refugee hosting countries of the Levant, Turkey has been hosting the largest share
of Syrian refugees in the world. Despite the number of refugees settled in Turkey standing at more than
3,6 million, Turkey does not have an explicit comprehensive integration framework – although it does
have a broad range of supportive policies. This paper explores the intersections between refugee
entrepreneurism and integration. It focuses on national and transnational entrepreneurial activities of
Syrian refugees in Turkey examining the relationship between such activities and integration. The main
research question addressed in this paper is whether the entrepreneurship activities supports the
integration processes of Syrian refugees in Turkey, by drawing fieldwork in Istanbul. It measures
processes of adaptation of Syrians by focusing on the legal-political and socio-economic dimensions of
integration. The focus of my analysis of the situations of Syrian refugees in Turkey is related to financial
resources that help Syrians to reach a kind of stability and security. The data consists of 50 semi-
structured in-depth interviews conducted with Syrian refugee entrepreneurs in Istanbul. I argue that
national and transnational entrepreneurial activities support the integration of Syrian refugees in
Turkey.

Biography: Dr. Doğuş Şimşek currently teaches at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at
Koç University. She previously carried out her own research project entitled ‘the integration processes
of Syrian refugees in Turkey, funded by TÜBİTAK-BİDEB at Migration Research Centre (MireKoc)
at Koc University. She received her PhD in Sociology from City University London and MA in Cultural
Studies from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Before joining MireKoc at Koc University,
she taught Sociology of Migration module at Regent’s University London and sociology modules at
University of London, City. Her research interests broadly cover integration, transnational migration,
refugee studies, race and racism, gender and migration and second generation’s identity. She has
published numerous articles, research reports, op-eds and presented her researches at international and
national conferences.

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 Melancholic response to war violence and displacement

Kalina Yordanova

Doctors Without Borders

This paper outlines some psychological aspects of experiences of persecution, internment and
mass displacement. Informed by psychology and anthropology, it uses clinical findings from the
psychological consultations of Syrian refugees, done in refugee facilities in Greece and Bulgaria. It
shows that war violence and forced displacement construct a depressive response of a melancholic type
in a huge number of survivors. The paper also suggests an intergenerational aspect to this response.
Children on the move are exposed to violent content without having the emotional and cognitive
maturity to grasp it. As a result, they need their parents to help them understand their experience, but
parents, on the other hand, are absorbed by their own unresolved traumatic past and are not able to deal
with their children’s anxieties. Thus, children identify with their parents’ prolonged grief and with the
unconscious assumption that the war has robbed them of all opportunities. The paper introduces the
social aspects of displacement, too. Situated in immediate proximity to Syria, Lebanon is faced with
the challenge of an immense refugee influx. Having lost families, home and networks, and drifting to
the new environment’s periphery, refugees tend to regard host countries with ambivalence as an
expression of inner vulnerabilities. Psychoanalyst Darian Leader (2008) argues that the destruction of
the social tissue of communities and the subsequent solitude in exile prevent mourners from further
integration. Finally, from a wider international perspective, the refugee issue stirs a rather xeno-racist
discourse. While the Syrian crisis calls for humanitarian action, it also fuels debates nationally on how
many refugees can be accepted by each country. The subsequent rise of European ultra-right-wing
parties massively projects feelings of chaos and badness into the refugees, who find themselves, as the
object of such projections, outside the others’ compassionate response and imbued with hostility
(Varvin, 2017)

Biography: Kalina Yordanova is a clinical psychologist and anthropologist. She holds a MA degree in
Clinical Psychology (Sofia University), a MA degree in Central and East European Studies (UCL, UK)
and a Doctoral Degree in Anthropology and Psychoanalysis (UCL, UK). She has published on the topics
of memory transmission, melancholia and forced migration. Her fieldwork was in Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Kalina Yordanova is part of Doctors Without Borders’ mental health team (MSF). Over
the last 10 years, she has been working with refugees of war and victims of torture, mainly from Syria
and Iraq.

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