Refugees and the Global Cold War - spring semester 2024

This seminar explores the social, cultural, and political history of the global Cold War through the lens of forced migrations and humanitarian aid. While traditional Cold War narratives perpetuate images of refugees fleeing from Eastern Europe to the West, this seminar challenges this clear-cut dichotomy. It expands the geographical range of forced displacement to include emergencies in the Global South, by paying attention to entanglements across and within different regions. It studies major organizations like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees across other agents, such as NGOs, regional and national institutions. It takes into consideration refugees’ agencies, trajectories, and cultural production. It then situates refugees within local communities, stressing the challenges and the opportunities of integration. Classes will be organized through a combination of lectures, discussions of primary and of secondary sources. In the first part, we will focus on the historiography of forced migrations during the Cold War, on refugees’ voices, and on refugee camps as spaces of humanitarian interventions and surveillance. A session will be dedicated to the preparation of the research paper. The second part of the seminar will concentrate on case-studies: forced displacements in post-WWII Europe; the entanglement of Jewish and Palestinian displacement; the partition in India and Pakistan; refugees in South-East Asia; refugees in the Horn of Africa; and refugees in Central America.