Refugees Archives - Public Seminar

Podcast

What of the “Homeless, Tempest Tost”?

Episode 6

May 30, 2025 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Hiroshi Motomura and Cristina M Rodríguez

This week, our hosts explore the closing of the US refugee resettlement program, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and the asylum process. Our guest speaker is Mark Hetfield, President of HIAS.

Migration

Social Research on Exile

Banishment, “refugeedom,” and the political problem of our time

September 4, 2024 • by Social Research

In the latest issue of Social Research (Vol. 92, No. 1), scholars explore the nature of exile. Some essays reflect on exile forced by war and political persecution, others on the difference between being an exile and being a refugee. TABLE OF CONTENTS Avishai Margalit, "Internal Exile and Politics"This essay has two ...

Middle East & North Africa

Palestine and the Subversion of International Law

How the UNRWA paradox underpins Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing

June 17, 2024 • by Widad Tamimi

For Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, freedom of movement is non-existent. But to flee is to lose one’s right of return. International law underpins Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing....

Palestine and the Subversion of International Law

Migration

Held Hostage to One’s Values

On the responsibility to refugees at the Belarusian-Polish border

April 25, 2023 • by Lidia Zessin-Jurek

The Polish-Belarusian border crossing has been, since mid-2021, one of the world’s many border zones where people get sick and die under the watchful eye of the state....

Interviews

Documenting the City of Refugees

An interview with Susan Hartman on her new book about Utica’s transformation by refugees

October 4, 2022 • by Susan Hartman and Marisa Budlong

I wanted to put in perspective what these refugees had gone through, what the countries they left had gone through, what the refugee camp experience was like. So, there is this part where I talk about when they were each on the run: it is very traumatic material and this ...

Europe & Central Asia

Different People

After fleeing war-ravaged Kharkiv, many have found refuge and hospitality in Poltava. How does it feel to be an internally displaced person in one’s own city of birth?

September 12, 2022 • by Andrei Krasniashchikh

The displaced can be recognized by their backpacks and the plastic bags they’re carrying, filled with humanitarian aid. Also, by their rapid pace. The displaced move fast: from explosion to explosion. ...

Europe & Central Asia

What We Can Learn from the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis

Ways to improve the global protection regime

March 23, 2022 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff

The international refugee regime lacks a global responsibility-sharing system; so the vast majority of the world’s refugees stay—for years and years—in the states to which they first flee. ...

What We Can Learn from the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis

Migration

Can Refugee Scholars Hold the Line?

Why the theoretical line that separates forced migrants from other persons on the move may not be sustainable

June 21, 2021 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff

_____ My title doesn’t refer to whether refugee scholars should help others fend off attacks from governments and populist parties that are intent on destroying the international protection regimes we study. Most of us are already so engaged. Rather, I am asking a conceptual question about the nature of refugee scholarship: does ...

History

Muscovite

An excerpt from “The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time”

October 1, 2020 • by Hugh Raffles

During the years I was writing this book, my mother began to lose her memory, or, as she often said, she started “getting stupid.” I traveled frequently to London at this time, and on one of these trips visited the house in Belsize Park in which Sigmund Freud spent the ...

Migration

On Refugees and Innocence

January 16, 2020 • by Miriam Ticktin

Innocence is now the key qualifier for someone who claims to be a refugee. Paradoxically, as part of this moralized regime, innocence is also claimed by those who grant asylum. The qualification that refugees must be seen as innocent can change their fate at different points. Those requesting asylum may ...

Migration

From Offshore Detention of Refugees to Indigenous Incarceration

December 18, 2019 • by Anne McNevin

Well before this crisis, conditions in Australia’s offshore camps were described as “torture” by medical professionals, Amnesty International, and refugees themselves. Médecins Sans Frontières reported “catastrophic effects on …mental health” that are “among the worst that MSF has ever seen.” Twelve refugees have died while held offshore. Benham Satah, a Kurdish refugee who witnessed ...

From Offshore Detention of Refugees to Indigenous Incarceration

Migration

The Epistemology of the Refugee: 30 Years after Zolberg

Introduction to the Zolberg Institute Special Issue

December 16, 2019 • by Daniel Calzadillas-Rodriguez

Zolberg, Suhrke, and Aguayo’s analysis is centered around the question who is recognized as a refugee -- still a contested issue in today’s public discourse, as people arriving at the southern U.S. border are alternatively categorized as “refugees” or “economic migrants.” Although the majority of migrants at the southern border ...