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Journal of Refugee Studies Vol. 30, No. 2 C The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
doi: 10.1093/jrs/fex0l8

The History of Refugee Protection:

Conceptual and Methodological Challenges

J. OLAF KLEIST
Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, University of Osnabruck,
Germany

MS received May 2017; revised MS received June 2017

Forced migration has always existed and yet societies and policy makers are
regularly surprised by the arrival of refugees. Similarly, refugee studies is
caught between the assertion that displacement and refugee protection are
a constant phenomenon of our history and the presentness of its current
policy relevance. Neither being wrong, both viewpoints run the risk of
arguing a-historically, ignoring either precedents or transformations. The
multi-disciplinary field of refugee studies lacks a reflection on conceptual,
theoretical and methodological challenges of its historical perspective. Until
recently, it faced a historiographical lacuna with few historians researching
forced migration systematically and, in turn, little historical research being
adopted in refugee studies (Marfleet 2007).
This is not to say that refugee studies was unconscious of the past.
Important studies by non-historians, influential in the field of refugee studies,
detailed the development of institutions (Skran 1995; Betts et al. 2011; Betts
and Loescher 2014; Goodwin-Gill 2014) and analysed case studies about the
historical response to refugee protection needs (Zolberg et al. 1986; Gibney
2004; Price 2009; Chatty 2013). These have been central to our understanding
of refugees and refugee protection. However, the narratives can be at times
anecdotal, selective or lack a broader historical contextualization beyond the
issue of refugees. As the study of the past is to challenge perceptions of the
refugee present, interpreting the past from the present can run the risk of
arguing in circles. This dilemma cannot be fully resolved but can be coun-
teracted by historiographical theory and methodology.
Despite a lack of systematic exploration of refugee history, there is an
important number of exceptions where historians are engaging in depth
with historical displacement and refugee protection (see Gatrell in this
issue). In the aftermath of the post-World War Two displacement crisis,
some publications looked at the rise and development of international refugee
organizations (Holborn 1956; Stoessinger 1956; Holborn 1975), followed by
histories of earlier episodes of displacement (Mercier 1974; Porter 1979).
Amidst heightened public and political debates about migration and asylum
162 J. Olaf Kleist

after the end of the Cold War, refugee history received growing interest.
Historians began writing comprehensive social, cultural and new political
histories of refugees and refugee reception (Noiriel 1991; Bade 1994; Knox
and Kushner 1999; Marrus 2002; Neumann 2004; Oltmer 2005; Khan 2007;
Gatrell 2013). Yet, these studies remained remarkably isolated despite being
cognizant of each other's work. It was not until recently that the question of
what it means to study refugee history was discussed more systematically and
comparatively across national boundaries and, crucially, within refugee
studies (Harzig and Hoerder 2009; Neumann 2011; Glynn and Kleist 2012;
Hahn 2012; Gatrell in this issue). Not least, as the Syrian refugee crisis
reached Europe, the necessity to study the historical roots of displacement
and of refugee policies and the quest for new approaches became more
pressing. 1
This special issue is a contribution to bringing historiography and historical
reflection into refugee studies. It thereby engages with two specific aspects of
refugee history. Rather than focusing on historical episodes of displacement
and flight and its variations throughout history, tracing changes of political
and religious persecution and of conflicts and wars as drivers of forced mi-
gration, this issue's contributors concentrate on the history of refugee pro-
tection. In particular, the authors discuss rationales for receiving non-
members in a community and the arguments put forward to protect for-
eigners. Moreover, they analyse the strategic, political and ethical norms
behind those arguments and the practical implications of protection. This
concerns not only societies offering (or rejecting) protection, but the crucial
role of what Peter Gatrell termed 'refugeedom' (Gatrell 2013, and in this
issue)-the networks and activities of refugees themselves, pursuing and
organizing protection (see also Lachenicht in this issue). In a fascinating
way, we can see how perceptions about refugees, refuge and protection are
repeated throughout centuries to the present day and yet are intricately inter-
twined in the social and political constellations of their times.
Moreover, this special issue is aimed at broadening the view on refugee
history. Tracing back refugee protection can lead to various presumed ori-
gins. With the predominance of the Geneva Refugee Convention, the current
refugee regime is arguably a post-World War Two phenomenon. Yet, the
League of Nations was its precursor and refugee movements of the
European interwar period were its condition (Skran 1995; Oltmer in this
issue). Capturing the twentieth-century experience of displacement and refu-
gee protection as a modern phenomenon casts the time frame even wider,
including refugee movements and politics between nations and empires in the
nineteenth century (Noiriel 1991; Manasek in this issue), at least. However,
whether modern refugee protection begins with the implementation of polit-
ical asylum in Article 120 of the 1793 French constitution or with the 1646
peace of Westphalia and the mutual recognition of sovereign territorial pro-
tection rights (Orchard in this issue) remains an open question. Moreover, the
practice of offering protection to others is an even older tradition (and one
 The History of Refugee Protection 163

beyond Europe) including offering refuge for religious minorities in early

modernity (Lachenicht in this issue), protection norms for foreigners in medi-
eval times (Lambert in this issue), access to the Roman empire for persecuted
groups (Heather in this issue), rights for displaced persons in ancient Greece
(Gray in this issue) and other previous practices. Ultimately, the universal
refugee history does not have a beginning. Studying the refugee past requires
acknowledgement that all historical periods and societies had specific norms
and practices of protection that are precursors and contrasts to today's re-
sponses to refugee situations.
Thus, this special issue attempts to start a discussion on the long history-
the longue durie-of refugee protection. Far from being able to provide such a
history comprehensively, it poses some questions and considerations. It brings
together leading and new historians reflecting on the reception of refugees by
refugee receiving societies from ancient Greece to current humanitarianism in
Central Africa. Originating from a lecture series held at the Refugee Studies
Centre in Oxford in Hilary term 2014, the contributions brought about a
number of challenges when approaching refugee protection historically.
Among them are conceptual, theoretical and methodological issues that the
authors confront in their contributions. They are not exclusive to historiog-
raphy or refugee research but studying the history of refugee protection
makes it particularly pertinent to reflect on these challenges. Below, I will
highlight some of them.

Historicizing Concepts in Refugee History

Historicizing past events is a double bind. It requires us to understand our
object of interest in historical context, both in its contemporary situation and
in the chronological development of history. It means interpreting the socio-
political constellation of the past and relating it to the present. Historicizing
then describes an attempt at counteracting projections of current concepts
into history without divorcing the relevance of the past from the present. To
better understand the present through historical interpretation, we need to
rethink familiar and fundamental concepts to go beyond the limits of our
own historical container. Thus, refugee history forces us to rethink concepts
such as 'refugee', 'protection' and 'migration'.

Who Is a Refugee?

Defining its object of interest is probably the most persistent task of refugee
studies (Turton 2003; Hathaway 2007; see also Betts 2010). Accounting for
history makes it only more difficult. Article 1 of the Geneva Refugee
Convention sets forth the predominant understanding of who is a refugee
today, including criteria in the country of origin and the necessity of being
outside that country. Contemporary critiques of this definition (e.g. Betts 2013)
point to other relevant causes of forced displacement such as wars, conflicts
164 J. Olaf Kleist

and economic deprivation reasons that were particularly relevant throughout

history. Others question the necessity of having crossed an international border
(Shaknove 1985), which is a problematic criterion in a historical context also,
when territorial borders were ill-defined, not controlled or did not exist at all
(see Lambert in this issue). Since the 'refugee' category depends on historical
circumstances of social and political organization, studying refugee history
throughout the centuries and millennia then requires a coherent and consistent
conception of what the object and area of research are.
Alternative academic definitions often point to the refugees' transforming
relationship with states, losing and regaining protection (Shaknove 1985;
Gibney 2004). However, this requires the existence of modern nation states
with citizenship and political rights. Inspired by ancient Athens's absence of a
state, Hannah Arendt emphasized instead political communities that could
offer rights and protection (Arendt 1994). Turning refugee definitions on
their head (or rather on their feet), refugee history, then, is not predicated
on a particularly defined group of people that has not coherently existed
throughout history in the first place. Instead, I suggest, refugee history stu-
dies how groups and political organizations offered non-transient protection
to non-members. Thus, refugee history indirectly studies how societies
organized and negotiated political belonging and rights through the category
of the refugee. This included refugees themselves who played an active part in
their search for protection in forming and transforming historical-political
communities (Gatrell and Lachenicht in this issue). Crucially, we can discuss
and compare 'refugees' throughout history because, unlike 'forced migrants',
they are not defined by causes of displacement, but reflect historical devel-
opments of political belonging, rights and protection.

What Is Protection?
This shift of perspective on refugees, from emphasizing displacement to
rights, requires also rethinking the category of protection. Today, refugee
protection is basically non-refoulement (Orchard in this issue) and, in many
cases, also the right to access a territory in the first place (Heather in this
issue). However, if we consider past societies that are not territorially
organized, protection is the inclusion into the legal system of a political
community by extending a particular status of rights (Gray and Lambert in
this issue). Similarly, humanitarianism offers protection of human rights with-
out respect to territory in the context of the international legal system
(Glasman in this issue). In modern states, however, the legal system and
the rights of refugee protection are dependent on sovereign power that is
nominally tied to territory, emphasizing questions of borders, access and
leave to remain (Manasek and Oltmer in this issue). Thus, refugee protection
concerns a set of rights that are particular of a historical period and its
political and legal system. In ancient Athens, refugees were exempt from
the foreigners' tax (metoikion) and received legal rights similar to those of
 The History of Refugee Protection 165

citizens (Gray in this issue). Today, the Geneva Convention details a number
of social and political rights that have to be afforded to refugees, while hu-
manitarianism is aimed at protecting the human rights of refugees (Glasman
in this issue). Refugee protection is inclusion in a political community, some-
times with limited rights or delayed access to full membership, to remedy a
loss of protection elsewhere. The perceived or argued causes of displacement
that qualify for refugee status include examples like loss of safety or certain
rights, mirror norms and organization of the political community-though
underlying reasons may be economic or political interests (Gray, Lachenicht,
Manasek and Oltmer in this issue). Thus, refugee protection is characteristic
of a historical period and society while being negotiated and transformed
over time along with social and political conflicts and developments (Gray,
Lachenicht, Orchard, Oltmer and Glasman in this issue). The history of refu-
gee protection is a history of political organization.

How to Migrate?
Migration, from one political community to another, is a condition to finding
refuge and appears to be a constant of refugee history. However, the character
of mobility changed dramatically over time and affected forced migration and
access to refugee protection dramatically. Peter Heather points out (in this
issue) that travel times in antiquity were about 10 times longer than today.
Journeys that would have lasted weeks now only take a few hours by plane.
This impacted who could seek refuge and how, making mass migration more
likely when individual journeys were particularly strenuous and dangerous. We
have seen in more recent developments how cheaper air travel and, currently,
mobile technologies as well as digital and social media enabled refugee move-
ments that were previously impossible. Thus, beyond social and political par-
ticularities of refugee protection, refugee history has to consider geographic
transformations due to technological limitations and developments over time.
This includes technological advances in border control and migration manage-
ment, from border walls (Heather in this issue) to the introduction of the
passport (Noiriel 1991; Torpey 2000) to satellite and drone surveillance.
Technology changes affect not only access to protection, but also its delivery
and character through documents, databases and provisions. Joel Glasman (in
this issue) shows in UNHCR's humanitarian work that technological develop-
ments indicate not necessarily progress towards better protection, but novel
ways of classifying refugees. Technology changes refugee history by impacting
who can receive a refugee status and what that implies.

Researching Refugee History: Methodological Challenges

Historical research has a seeming advantage over the social sciences that
focus on the present or very recent past: historians have access to a treasure
trove of official documents in national archives, organizational archives like
166 J. Olaf Kleist

the UNHCR and even private ones. Letters, memos and directives that are
otherwise hidden from scrutiny are available and give insight into the inner
workings of institutions of the refugee regime. With these sources, refugee
history can offer an important corrective to the study of present administra-
tive practices, trace refugee policy developments and help understand motives
driving policy changes (see Manasek in this issue). However, archives have
significant limitations and drawbacks, some of which are particularly signifi-
cant to historians of the refugee past.
Archives cover only a certain period from early modernity and particularly
the beginning of democracy up to usually 30 years prior to the present.
Research about older periods relies on preserved accounts, tracts, documents,
treaties and charters, poems and plays and other written material, sometimes
inscribed in stone, coins and other archaeological artefacts that survived (see
Gray, Heather and Lambert in this issue). Later came books, newspapers and
other documented media as well as parliamentary documentations as add-
itional sources. On the one hand, these sources contain significant gaps due
to lost documents, especially from early periods, but also due to a selective
documentation. On the other hand, more recent periods may suffer from an
excess of documentation with too many newspapers and publication to fully
grasp political issues. Also, historical sources are harder to research in the
Global South, reproducing power imbalances in research material (Chimni
1998).
Thus, what is not covered but missing in the sources is just as important as
the documents themselves. This is particularly relevant in regard to refugees
who seldom have a voice in these sources. National archives provide a gov-
erning perspective on refugees (see Manasek in this issue), while newspapers
and journals usually reflect public debates of receiving societies. Refugees
who play a crucial role in forming refugee policies and negotiating protection
measures are usually not represented (see Gatrell and Lachenicht in this
issue). This creates a significant power imbalance in historical research with
blind spots in crucial areas of refugee research. While diaries and autobio-
graphies of refugees exist especially in later periods, they rarely cover experi-
ences of the most vulnerable such as women and children, let alone illiterate
or poverty-stricken refugees and refugees in the Global South. Historians of
contemporary history may turn to oral history to create new sources that
may bring otherwise under-represented voices into research.
At this point, historiography intersects with social sciences, especially with
ethnographic and sociological research when dealing with ethical and inter-
pretative challenges of interviewing refugees and other vulnerable groups
(Jacobsen and Landau 2003). Ultimately, the line between the past and the
present is blurred. Where refugee history faces biased sources, social scientific
refugee research is faced with a similar challenge when considering its policy
relevance. Nicolas van Hear (2012) suggests embedding refugee research in
social theories of transformation while reflecting on power relations in the
production of knowledge to counteract misconceptions and categories of
 The History of Refugee Protection 167

everyday practice. While refugee history offers refugee studies an important

historical perspective to this end, it profits in turn from social science theories
and concepts that have already been applied to refugee topics and may help
differentiate historical misconceptions and categories.

The Future of Refugee History: Refugee Studies and Historiography

Historiography saw a significant increase in interest in the refugee topic in
recent years, especially by young and emerging scholars. This creates an op-
portunity for filling the many gaps of non- or under-researched episodes,
periods and developments in the longue duree of refugee history that could
only be hinted at here. The contributions to this special issue show a great
variety of historiographical approaches to refugee studies, working with a
wide array of sources and inspiring interpretations. With refugee history far
from being mainstream, we should see a further differentiation of perspec-
tives, including social, cultural, political and economic histories of refugees.
Studies about the history of refugees in the Global South, despite the chal-
lenges described above, would be important contributions, just like compara-
tive studies of different regions or periods.
However, refugee history cannot stand by itself. I have argued in this
introduction that examining refugee protection from a historical perspective
forces us to rethink some of the fundamental concepts and categories for the
present. Social sciences need to take historiography and their narratives ser-
iously in their complexity and incorporate them in their own works. In turn,
multi-disciplinary refugee studies can help inform historiographical interpret-
ation and narratives with social science methods, concepts and theories.
Refugee studies and historiography should grow together; historical refugee
studies should be as common as any social science approach to studying
refugees.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Matthew Gibney, Alexander Betts, Cathryn Costello,
Gil Loescher, Tai Sayarath, the Refugee Studies Centre Oxford and the
German Research Foundation, as well as all presenters and participants of
the RSC Seminar Series Hilary term 2014 and all contributors to this special
issue.

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