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

When the World Abandoned the Cambodian Refugees

An interview with author James Taing about his father’s escape from the Cambodian genocide

March 22, 2023 • by Tobias Lentz and James Taing

I think in today's world where everyone has an immigration problem, we need to make sure we are not repeating the same mistakes....

When the World Abandoned the Cambodian Refugees

Genocide

Left on a Mountain to Die

An excerpt from Under the Naga Tail: The escape from the Cambodian Genocide

March 22, 2023 • by James Taing and Mae Bunseng Taing

An excerpt of Under the Naga Tail, the memoir of a refugee who escaped the Killing Fields in Cambodia....

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

Europe 1948/2022

Uncontrolled migration is one of Russia’s weapons in its war with the West

March 23, 2022 • by Simon Garnett

Unlike in 2015, European citizens are unanimous in their solidarity with the refugees. Public opinion counts. In Poland especially, neighborliness is everywhere to be seen, despite all the historical baggage between the two countries. This time, there is a good chance that member state governments will rise to the challenge....

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

The Measurement of Loss

What do I take with me? How much can I carry when on foot?

March 22, 2022 • by Andreas Kossert

The flight of the refugee is not, as I understand it, migration. Although the boundary can be fluid, not all those who risk their lives to cross the Mediterranean, for example, are refugees. The two must be differentiated to protect the refugee against the threat of terminological arbitrariness....

Interviews

In the Aftermath of War

What the post-1975 history of the Vietnam War should teach us about the days, months, and years after the United States leaves Afghanistan

August 27, 2021 • by Claire Potter and Amanda Demmer

_____ As the military situation in Afghanistan began to unspool at the end of July, and comparisons to the United States 1975 evacuation of Saigon proliferated, I wanted to know more. So I reached for Amanda Demmer’s After Saigon's Fall: Refugees and US-Vietnamese Relations, 1975–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2021) to think ...