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For the past half century the UNHCR has been central to the international debates about human rights, conflict resolution, sovereignty, intervention and preventative action, and the role of international organizations in world politics. A central theme is change and continuity in the international political and security systems, in the refugee regime, and in the UNHCR. Contemporary refugee crises are placing the UNHCR under growing pressure regarding both its functions and identity. From focusing almost exclusively on protection and humanitarian relief for refugees in host countries, the UNHCR has progressively taken on additional responsibilities that involve it in a myriad of activities for refugees and non‐refugees alike.

Since the Anglo-American invasion and the fall of the Ba’athist regime in 2003, Iraq has been through profound changes. New and heightened levels of human security have led to large numbers of refugees seeking refuge in neighbouring Arab countries such as Syria and Jordan. This has also resulted in internal displacement within the country. This chapter discusses the historical and political context of Iraqi displacement to the northern regions of Iraq and the neighbouring countries of Syria and Jordan. It examines the effect of the international humanitarian aid regime’s designation of ‘unprecedented refugee crisis’ to the forced migrants and to the political actors of the region. The creation of a state-centred approach and the visibility of Iraqi refugees created other invisibilities that concealed and obscured the question of the prevalence of forced migrations and the dynamics of cross-border ties which have spanned for decades. These trends of Iraqi migration have been shaped by successive coercive governments which have fragmented the population along religious, ethnic and ideological orientations and by the nature of the polities from which Iraqis sought security. By analysing the trends and context of Iraqi migration, this chapter sheds light on the true nature of the Iraqi refugee agenda.

This chapter follows the fortunes of occupied Beijing and the “solitary island” of Shanghai, against the backdrop of a broader national crisis. Here, the outbreak of World War II in China in July 1937 launched a refugee crisis that profoundly changed perceptions of “poverty” and its realities. In Beijing, the chapter shows that while the collaborationist government largely preserved the existing structure of poor relief, aggressive policing tactics resulted in the large-scale incarceration of people who aroused suspicion simply because they were homeless. In contrast, treaty port Shanghai, which remained free of Japanese occupation until the Pearl Harbor attack, became a temporary haven for more than 1.5 million refugees. The initial outpouring of sympathy for war victims transformed the face of urban poverty. But when the crisis did not abate, the refugee issue hardened into “the beggar problem,” reconfiguring old debates about both poverty and responsibility for poor relief.

This chapter is concerned with the limits of the public rather than the official response to the refugee crisis. It picks up thematically and chronologically where Chapter 4 leaves off with the intensification of the public campaign against the expulsions, loosely centred around Victor Gollancz's ‘Save Europe Now’ movement, and climaxing with a mass rally in London against the backdrop of hysteria about the ‘flooding’ of the British zone with German refugees. The second half of the chapter discusses why public interest in these issues fell away after December 1945, and reflects on the character and wider significance of the British response to the expulsions and refugee crisis, and how this can be explained in terms of a central opposition between population transfer in principle and practice.

This chapter outlines humanitarian and human rights consequences of the United States's (U.S.) invasion and occupation of Iraq. It contextualizes the displacement crisis by tracing how U.S. foreign policy contributed to the humanitarian disaster. It examines the topic of advocacy for Iraqi refugees and highlights the efforts of international NGOs to compel the United States and the international community to comprehensively address the displacement crisis. This analysis is based on documentary evidence from nongovernmental and official sources and approximately thirty interviews with staff and officials from NGOs, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and Congressional staff members working on immigrant and refugee policy. Research shows that while NGOs have been the most important actors calling for accountability for displaced Iraqis, they are constrained by the politics of humanitarian assistance in the United States and Middle East. It concludes by highlighting the Bush administration's failure to take responsibility for the human costs of the U.S. invasion and considers the effects of public apathy in the United States about the impact of the war on Iraqis.

Discusses the aims and the conduct of the NATO bombing campaign against the Yugoslavia; the refugee crisis and civilian casualties of the campaign; and the diplomatic events leading to the final peace agreement. The chapter argues that the NATO campaign did not itself provoke Serbian military's attacks on Kosovo civilians, but that the intervention and the removal of ground monitors may have created an internal environment that made Belgrade government's cleansing operation feasible. The chapter concludes that the intervention failed to achieve its avowed aim of preventing massive ethnic cleansing, that the Kosovar Albanian population had to endure tremendous suffering before finally achieving their freedom and that Milosevic remained in power, however, as an indicted war criminal.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the refugee crisis that occurred in the mid-seventeenth century, when a huge wave of Jewish refugees and forced migrants from eastern Europe spread across the Jewish communities of Europe and Asia. Destitute, often traumatized by their experiences, and lacking any means of support, these refugees posed a huge social, economic, and ethical challenge to the Jewish world of their day. Communities across that world, touched by the crisis, answered this challenge in unprecedented ways and, both individually and jointly, began to organize relief for the Polish–Lithuanian Jews wherever they now found themselves. This book examines this refugee crisis in detail. At its heart are three major questions. The first asks how Jewish society reacted to the persecution and violence suffered by the Jews of Poland–Lithuania. The second question asks about the character of the relationship between the various Jewish communities that cooperated to help the refugees. The third question deals with how the nature of the refugee crisis in the seventeenth century may have something to contribute to the ways in which people understand the history of refugee issues in general.

This chapter traces the origins of American refugee policy. Twentieth-century refugee policy provides a powerful example of how presidents have played a leading role in determining which noncitizens should be allowed to enter the United States, and it reflects the dynamism and creativity of executive governance. In the service of foreign affairs and humanitarianism, presidents of this era transformed bureaucratic tools meant to be case management devices, such as the parole power, into instruments for remaking the immigration system by their own lights. Perhaps not surprisingly, the specter of emergency frequently has propelled these presidential initiatives. Wartime labor shortages and sudden refugee crises have given rise to vivid examples of executive unilateralism. But much of the historical use of the parole power fits uncomfortably into an emergency framework: the statutory grant hardly looks like a delegation of emergency authority. The President’s influence over immigration instead has deeper roots. His role has extended far beyond responding rapidly in emergency contexts to exploiting seemingly limited powers to serve an administration’s ongoing foreign and domestic policy objectives.

This concluding chapter assesses whether the fate of the Polish Jewish refugees in each of the three major arenas in which they found themselves was really a single, interconnected refugee crisis or whether there were, in fact, three different crises sparked by a common cause: the mid-seventeenth-century wars of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Underlying all of the differences in the conditions in each of the three regions were numerous commonalities. Perhaps most important was the sense of solidarity that induced Jews to come to the aid of other Jews in distress. The term most commonly used at the time to describe this connection was “brotherhood.” The phenomena examined in this book are indeed, therefore, aspects of a single refugee crisis. The chapter then considers how large the problem was and how well Jewish society dealt with its challenges. It also highlights the effects of the refugee crisis on Jewish society, both while it was happening and in the longer term, and the importance of the crisis for the course of early modern and modern Jewish history in general.

This concluding chapter explains that Jewish refugees' daily lives and feelings, their objective escapes and subjective fears, are part and parcel of the Holocaust and can expand one's sense of its range and impact. Formerly citizens with rights, stable lives, family networks, and friends, they had faced previously unimaginable losses—personal, political, economic, and social. And although immeasurably luckier than Jews caught up in the Nazi genocide, few refugees knew that at the time. They realized that friends and family trapped in Europe suffered, but they could not predict mass murder, nor did they realize until later that Portugal had saved their lives. The chapter then describes how the story of Jewish refugees in Portugal exemplifies the terrible odysseys of many refugees who fled before and after them. Since a focus on feelings opens an unusual lens onto the hardships of all refugees, this book's history of refugees' daily lives and emotions can hopefully add to studies of refugee crises, whether historical or contemporary.

Chapter 2 examines the Caribbean refugee crisis of 1980 and the government’s response. After more than one hundred thousand Cubans and tens of thousands of Haitians arrived on American shores in a matter of months, the Carter administration implemented a policy of detention for both groups. But this temporary response mutated into a more permanent policy of long-term detention for Haitians (as well as several hundred Cubans) and ultimately into the more widespread use of detention for asylum seekers. This chapter also explores the origins and early history of the Krome Avenue Detention Center in Miami, a site that remained central to the history of immigration detention and also documents attempts by the government to create its first refugee processing center and detention facility outside of the mainland United States, in Fort Allen, Puerto Rico. Ultimately, the Carter administration’s treatment of Haitian asylum seekers at this critical moment in 1980 enabled the succeeding administration to dramatically expand the role of detention in the U.S. government’s immigration enforcement arsenal.

In the face of an increasing number of refugees reaching Manchester, the Quaker ISC could not justify any more than the Jewish community, what was at best a haphazard response to their needs. On 20 October 1938, the ISC declared itself ‘seriously concerned with the need to help the increasing number of refugees in this country’. The sense of a ‘refugee crisis’ had been developing since the Anschluss in March 1938. The most likely explanation, as it had been earlier in the case of the Jewish response, was pressure exerted from London. In the European capitals from which Kindertransports set out, Quakers helped families find places for their children, took part in organisational work, saw off children whose parents were barred from platforms, accompanied transports to Harwich, and arranged for the children to be met and befriended in London and Manchester.

This final chapter explores the refugee crises in Iraq and Georgia. The invasion of Iraq led to the displacement of almost five million Iraqis—2.2 million refugees and the rest internally displaced persons (IDPs). The refugees fled primarily to Syria (1.5 million) and Jordan (approximately 500,000). Most refugees did not stay in refugee camps. Many were previously middle class and survived initially for many months on their own resources. As neighboring countries closed their borders, refugees were deported back to Iraq when their visas expired. In Georgia the August 2008 War resulted in 158,000 new IDPs, with about 30,000 Georgians fleeing to Russia after the initial Georgian attack. Georgia demanded that the IDPs and the refugees be repatriated but the Russian government refused.

Following their expulsion from Mexico, several thousand Chinese and Chinese Mexican families entered the United States as illegal immigrants in the early 1930s. This chapter discusses the refugee crisis in the United States. It discusses the deportation of Chinese refugees from Mexico to China by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). INS officials held Chinese men and their families in immigration jails before deporting them to China. They also applied Chinese exclusion to Mexican women and sent them to China rather than back to Mexico.

This chapter examines the role of compassion in the phenomenon of witness bearing by telling the tragic story of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned on September 2, 2015, along with his mother, five-year-old brother, and other Syrian refugees when their boat capsized after leaving Bodrum in Turkey. A series of photographs of Alan taken by photo-journalist Nilüfer Demir have come to symbolise a perceived turning point in the emotional script of refugee reception in Europe. Drawing on the iconic visual testimony of Alan Kurdi's death, this chapter explores how compassion was mobilised in critiques of the restrictive policies and lack of action by the UK during the refugee crisis. It first considers how compassion has been used to mobilise resistance to restrictive government refugee policies before discussing the responses to Alan's death and how they engaged with a discourse of compassion.

This chapter explores the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 and beyond, in a discussion of the relationship between the spectator and the ‘other’. Drawing on two theatrical case studies - Vanishing Point’s (2016) The Destroyed Room and Zinnie Harris’ (2015) How to Hold Your Breath, I suggest ways in which live performance can respond to the erasure of humanity that is often practiced upon the refugee in the circulation of images. One chief strategy is through storytelling, an art-form that relies upon personal interaction and privileges experience over information. This chapter also applies Bernard Stiegler’s theory of ‘spiritual misery’ to performance analysis, and concludes with a discussion of the dangers of building a visual economy on the destruction of the face of the other.

This chapter provides an overview of the Polish–Lithuanian Jews' flight westward after 1648. Three major issues underlie the discussion as a whole. First is the nature of Jewish solidarity in those years and the fate of the Jewish refugees outside Poland–Lithuania when the religious imperative to ransom captives was not a relevant issue. Second is the policies adopted by the states of the Holy Roman Empire toward the refugees and their impact on the refugees themselves as they tried to rebuild their lives on German lands. Third is the new social and cultural formations created by the encounter of “eastern” and “western” Ashkenazim in the wake of the refugee crisis and their consequences for the development of German Jewry in both the short and long term.