2025/04/17 by Milinda Banerjee, Kerstin von Lingen · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies #Decolonization #Development economics #Economic history #Gender studies #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics #History #Law #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Race, History, and American Society #Refugee #Sociology #State (computer science)
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0018246x24000761
published in The Historical Journal 68(3), 499-517 (Cambridge University Press)
openalex publication_date 2025/04/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract The three decades spanning the 1930s, '40s, and '50s witnessed the birth of the modern global state system, characterized by a protracted and tortuous transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states. The demise of Nazi, British, and Japanese empires emancipated millions of people across the world. However, as old empires dissolved, new post-imperial states continued older colonial-origin forms of ethno-religious discrimination and ruling-class dominance, or invented novel hierarchies. Hence, this epoch was marked by catastrophic outbursts of racial violence, sectarian war, and genocide. If majoritarian nation-states were the privileged offspring of this transformation, then refugees were the unwanted issue. The national citizen and the refugee were co-created. Against their forced displacement and subalternization, refugees re-politicized their selves. We define this as ‘the refugee political’: refugees constructing themselves as political beings and building wide-ranging alliances – with churches, politicians, and entrepreneurs; with peasants, industrial workers, and feminists. They became ‘subaltern internationalists’, linking the Dachen Islands to the United States, and maritime Southeast Asia to India; connecting central European Jews to Australian women, or impoverished Indians to Soviet and Chinese communists. They created new forms of ‘refugee polis’ – political communities which were simultaneously local and daringly transnational.