What do colonial histories of movement across the ocean tell us about present day proposals to send asylum seekers to offshore sites? Lucy Mayblin, Joe Turner, Arshad Iskajee and Thom Davies explore this history of maritime measures, as part of the Moving People feature.
How can historians and archivists best document, preserve, and make accessible the voices and artifacts of refugee and migration experience? Paul Dudman, Heather Faulkner, Peter Gatrell, and Mezna Qato discuss with Ria Kapoor in this edition of the History Workshop podcast.
With new citizenship laws in India, the refugee is being used to determine the Indian citizen along religious lines. Ria Kapoor looks at how Partition in 1947 and the Pakistani refugee crisis of 1971 are shaping this process of redefinition.
The international community is facing numerous migration crises, much like those that drove the development of international refugee rights and protections in the twentieth century. But instead of embracing and strengthening legal mechanisms to protect these people, we are seeing them undermined by nationalist and anti-democratic forces. With that in mind, the historical context in which international rights for asylum seekers developed offers important perspective on what makes them valuable.
While drawing direct parallels to the modern day might be misleading, present-day Germany’s migration debates shares strong underlying themes with the fall of East Germany. The impact of push and pull factors, as well as the role that home and destination countries play in establishing them, continue to matter.
Celebrate Karl Marx’s 200th birthday with 10 stops on a new History Workshop audio tour of Marx’s London
What does it mean to live in a world with borders? Historian Becky Taylor reflects on the history of border controls.
