‘We Would Rather Drown Ourselves in Lake Victoria’: Refugee Women, Protest, and Polish Displacement in Colonial East Africa, 1948–49

Nowak, Katarzyna

doi:10.1080/02619288.2019.1677467

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…In different ways, these actions can again be understood as performative acts of agency and resistance similar to those undertaken by refugees in similar and other circumstances (e.g. Banko et al 2021: 78-89;Lingelbach 2020: 220-1;Nowak 2019). The results also speak to the limits of the survivors' agency and resistance because of their status as refugees/repatriates (e.g.…”

Section: Towards New Livesmentioning

confidence: 76%

Shaping ongoing survival in a Swedish refugee camp

Martínez

2022

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Among the hundreds of sites that housed survivors of Nazi persecution who came to Sweden in the spring and summer of 1945, one of the largest was at the small village of Öreryd. Between June 1945 and September 1946, around a thousand Jewish and non-Jewish Polish survivors came to this site, where they were expected to stay only until they were well enough to return to their home countries or migrate elsewhere. This article contributes to filling a gap in refugee history in Sweden, dealing with how survivors experienced Swedish refugee camps and shaped the refugee camp environment on their own terms. Thinking with Peter Gatrell’s framework of ‘refugeedom’, a wide range of sources have been examined for insight into how Polish survivors in the Öreryd refugee camp navigated the precarity and uncertainty of their existence as survivors and refugees in Sweden and endeavoured to shape their immediate and future lives.

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Section: Towards New Livesmentioning

confidence: 76%

Shaping ongoing survival in a Swedish refugee camp

Martínez

2022

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“…This article contributes to the growing literature on refugee agency (Chatterji 2013, Gatrell 2013, White 2017, Nowak 2019b. For example, Moulin and Nyers (2007) document how Sudanese refugees in Egypt, having been denied recognition as political actors, used protest to make demands of UNHCR.…”

Section: Refugee Agency Rights Claims and Bureaucratic (Non-)responsesmentioning

confidence: 98%

"The Greatest and Most Important Human Right": Citizenship and Bureaucratic Indifference in Refugee-UNHCR Correspondence

Abdelaaty

2024

Mig. Pol.

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This article examines how refugees advocate for themselves with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and what responses their communications engender. It analyzes letters sent by refugees in Kenya to UNHCR headquarters in Geneva between 1983 and 1994. The findings underline a disjuncture between refugees’ efforts to constitute themselves as political agents, and UNHCR’s insistence on viewing them as depoliticized subjects. The refugees perform citizenship vis-à-vis UNHCR, using their shared identity as a basis for collective claims-making and trying to renegotiate their unequal relationship with the international organization. To empower themselves, they adopt the international organization’s own refugee rights vocabulary and play off different organizations and layers of UNHCR against each other. UNHCR’s responses (or lack thereof) demonstrate the consequences of its insulation and bureaucratization. These insights are especially noteworthy in light of recent progress on meaningful refugee participation in the refugee regime.

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Petitioning for Palestine: refugee appeals to international authorities

Irfan¹

2020

Contemporary Levant

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In the second half of the twentieth century, stateless Palestinian refugees regularly submitted petitions to international authorities, particularly the UN. In these petitions, the refugees demanded their rights and invoked the UN's liberal internationalist discourse to assert the justice of their cause. This article explores what these petitions reveal about contentious politics among the Palestinian grassroots in the refugee camps. In so doing, it recasts Palestinian refugee camp communities as actors consciously engaged with international politics, and key drivers in internationalising the 'Question of Palestine'. By unpacking the petitions' internationalist aspects, the article also situates Palestinian refugee history within the broader context of postwar global governance. Finally, the analysis presented here challenges the state-centrism of existing historiography on petitioning, which examines the practice largely in relation to the growth of the state. By contrast, the case study of Palestinian petitioning shows that the practice can also be important in a setting of statelessness. This article therefore makes a series of contributions to understanding not only Palestinian political history, but also the practice of petitioning and the dynamics of postwar internationalism.

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‘We Would Rather Drown Ourselves in Lake Victoria’: Refugee Women, Protest, and Polish Displacement in Colonial East Africa, 1948–49

Cited by 6 publications

References 9 publications

Shaping ongoing survival in a Swedish refugee camp

Shaping ongoing survival in a Swedish refugee camp

"The Greatest and Most Important Human Right": Citizenship and Bureaucratic Indifference in Refugee-UNHCR Correspondence

Petitioning for Palestine: refugee appeals to international authorities

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