Book Review: Refugee Voices in Modern Global History: Reckoning with Refugeedom by Peter Gatrell, Katarzyna Nowak, Lauren Banko and Anindita Ghoshal

Across modern history, refugees have articulated their experiences and wishes against the backdrop of mass displacement brought about by world war, civil war, revolution, population exchange, decolonisation, and state formation. Men and women displaced in different sites, at different times and from different backgrounds played for high stakes: they deliberated about what to say and to whom, and they sought, expected and generated a response from international organisations and other actors. Refugee Voices in Modern Global History places refugees at the centre of modern history. It demonstrates how ordinary refugees understood their experiences and engaged with institutions that sought to resolve their predicament. It asks how, to whom, and in what circumstances refugees spoke of the emotional impact of displacement and how they expressed themselves politically as well as personally. It shows refugees to have consistently exercised agency. By adopting the term ‘refugeedom’ the authors show how the voices and perspectives of refugees can be incorporated alongside the power dynamics associated with the multiple incarnations of the refugee regime that ‘managed’ refugees and articulated ‘solutions’. Extensive archival research across three continents makes it possible to explain in comparative terms the significance attached to the encounters between refugees and officials in modern Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The result is an original and in-depth study of the contrasting responses of refugees to displacement and to the arrangements made on their behalf at a series of critical junctures in the past.