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When borders do matter: international migration and identity - States and refugees

9 important questions on When borders do matter: international migration and identity - States and refugees

What examples are there of forced displacement?

The Jews of ancient Egypt; the Prophet Muhammad and his early followers in Medina; Buddhists in Muslim-controlled northern India; Native Americans at the time of the European incursions - the pattern of forced displacement is as common in human history as it is distressing.

What distinguished involuntary migration after 1945?

What distinguished involuntary migration after 1945, was its sheer geographical sweep, its numerical scale, and the existence of agreed international standards on how migrants should be treated.
Just as the concept of the sovereign nation-state reached its apogee in the mid-twentieth century, the number of people who were forced to flee their homeland owing to persecution, war, disease, and famine reached unprecedented levels.

What did most modern states expect from immigrants?

Most states in the modern era demanded a high level of ideological commitment from their citizens, and in undemocratic countries those who did not conform and who lived to tell the tale were subject to harassment, abuse, and banishment.

What was recognized in an international convention at The Hague? What followed after this?

An international convention at The Hague recognized the right of persons to leave their homeland, no parallel right of ingress was confirmed.
States retained the power to reject any and all applicants, including refugees, and admissions criteria increasingly revolved around the political orientation of the sending country.

What is the UNHCR? What was determined there?

In 1951, the UN established the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), where a formal international protocol emerge for the treatment of displaced persons.
Refugees were defined as persons living abroad who had a well-grounded fear of persecution at home owing to their race, religion, nationality, political views, or membership in a social group.
UNHCR was given the mandate to find solutions to refugee crisis and to protect those who found themselves displaced, and its activities grew exponentially over the next seven decades.

What did the UNHCR focus on the first years of its existence?

During the first years of its existence, UNHCR focused most of its resources on the settlement of displaced persons in Europe.

Who fled because of the first Gulf War? What was it about?

When Saddam Hussein's troops overwhelmed oil-rich Kuwait in 1991, an international coalition of oil-dependent states, led by the US, forced the Iraqis out.
Estimates run as high as five million people forced to move during the crisis of 1990-1. Migrant workers in Kuwait and Iraq were the first to flee, with most entering the nearby Kingdom of Jordan.
After this first Gulf War, an uprising by Kurds in northern Iraq was put down in ruthless fashion by the forces loyal to Saddam.

What did the Kurdish refugee crisis illustrate?

The Kurdish refugee crisis was a post-Cold War phenomenon, but it illustrated the difficulties involved whenever a regime attempts to "cleanse" itself of potentially dissident populations within its national borders.

What happened in Myanmar regarding ethnicity?

What the UN described as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing, Bangladesh's immediate neighbor to the east, Myanmar (formerly Burma), began an assault on its minority Rohingya Muslim population.
In 2017 the Buddhist majority government, claiming that the country's Rohingya were illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, sent troops to attack and destroy whole villages in the north of the country, forcing almost one million people to flee their homes.

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

A Concise History of the World Since 1945 | 9781352010206 | W M Spellman

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