Refugees and Exile: From "Refugee Studies" to the National Order of Things
1995/10/01 by Liisa H. Malkki · 1,632 citations
Social Sciences · #Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography #Context (archaeology) #Deterritorialization #Diaspora #Diaspora, migration, transnational identity #Displacement (psychology) #Gender studies #History #Law #Migration, Refugees, and Integration #Nationalism #Political science #Politics #Refugee #Sociology #Transnationalism
paper · doi:10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.002431
published in Annual Review of Anthropology 24(1), 495-523 (Annual Reviews)
openalex publication_date 1995/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Abstract
This review offers a critical mappingo f the construction-in-progress of refugees and displacement as an anthropological domain of knowledge. It situates the emergence of “the refugee” and of “refugee studies” in two ways: first, historically, by looking at the management of displacement in Europe in the wake of World War II; and second, by tracing an array of different discursive and institutional domains within which “the refugee” and/or “being in exile” have been constituted. These domains include international law, international studies, documentary production by the United Nations and other international refugee agencies, development studies, and literary studies. The last part of the review briefly discusses recent work on displacement, diaspora, and deterritorialization in the context of studies of cultural identity, nationalism, transnational cultural forms—work that helps to conceptualize the anthropological study of displacement in new ways.
Cited by
- Where Now for Migration Studies? Problems, Purpose and Potential
- Humanitarianism with a Sovereign Face: UNHCR in the Global Undertow
- New Keywords: Migration and Borders
- The coloniality of integration: Rethinking the science-policy nexus
- ‘I knew about political asylum, but not about asylum for gay people’: How queer exiles come to apply (or not) for SOGI asylum in France
- Child Assistance and the Making of Modern Refugee Camps in Austria-Hungary during the First World War
- From subsistence to resistance: Asylum-seekers and the other ‘Occupy’ in Hong Kong
- Negotiating the Aftermath of Forced Migration: A View from the Intersection of War and Migration Studies in the Digital Age
- Categories that Blind Us, Categories that Bind Them: The Deployment of the Notion of Vulnerability for Syrian Refugees in Turkey
- Refugees and Guesthood in Turkey
- Contingent Homes: Mobility and Long-Term Conflict in the Contested Periphery of Georgia
- Women's Political Consciousness and Empowerment in Local, National, and Transnational Contexts: Guatemalan Refugees and Returnees
- Experimentation in humanitarian locations: UNHCR and biometric registration of Afghan refugees
- Introduction: Aspiring migrants, local crises and the imagination of futures ‘away from home’
- Evictability—A Relational Comparison: Fears, Manoeuvres and Regimes of Housing Insecurity in Rapidly Urbanising Cities
- Introduction to the virtual forum: Gaza's past, present, and futures
- Labour struggles as lived citizenship. Precarious migrant workers as agents of change
- Introduction: On Stuckness and Sites of Confinement
- The European Refugee Crisis and Humanitarian Citizenship in Greece
- Entangled in Social Safety Nets: Administrative Responses to and Lived Experiences of Internally Displaced Persons in Ukraine
- Adaptation-exaptation in international politics: UNRWA as the substitutive-compensatory pivot of the Palestinian condition
- Torturous dialogues: Geographies of trauma and spaces of exception
- Toward ‘multiplied displacement’: Theorizing at the intersections of migration and urban studies
- A rite of passage
- A Grudging Rescue: France, the Armenians of Cilicia, and the History of Humanitarian Evacuations
- ‘I prefer to go back the day before tomorrow, but I cannot’: Paternalistic migration policies and the ‘global exile’
- Who is “Queerer” and Deserves Resettlement?: Queer Asylum Seekers and Their Deservingness of Refugee Status in Turkey
- Topics, Notes and Comments
- Conflicting visibilities: Police and politics among border migrants in Chile
- Unveiling theCanvas Ceiling: A Multidisciplinary Literature Review of Refugee Employment and Workforce Integration
- Homeland‐Making among Cultural and Ethnic Kin: Ahıska Turks in Turkey
- WATCHING U.S. TELEVISION FROM THE PALESTINIAN STREET: The Media, the State, and Representational Interventions
- Childbearing against the state? Asylum seeker women in the Irish republic
- Neither Here nor There: Pakistani Hindu Refugee Claims at the Interface of the International and South Asian Refugee Regimes
- EXILED TO THE ANCESTRAL LAND: THE RESETTLEMENT, STRATIFICATION AND ASSIMILATION OF THE REFUGEES FROM VIETNAM IN CHINA
Related