The El Shatt refugee camp in Egypt was built on ‘sour ground’: a stretch of sandy desert just east of the Suez Canal, much pissed on by soldiers in its previous incarnation as a British army rear camp. The thin desert soil lacked vegetation or other micro-organisms that could break down organic matter. Drainage and garbage disposal were tricky too. But in this unpromising soil, residents made gardens. They raked up sand into low embankments just beyond the tentpegs of their tents to make ‘private’ plots, and then closer to the tent made steeper little banks to hold in earth planted with sorghum or watermelon, watered and fertilized with ‘tea-leaves and cinders’. They quickly raised thick patches of greenery.
The gardens didn’t produce much: the soil was too poor. ‘The maize seldom ripens, and the watermelons fall off when they’re quarter size.’ But that wasn’t the point. Gardening gave residents something to do—something for themselves, alongside the many more ‘collective’ tasks that were allocated in a camp whose residents, evacuees from the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia, were highly mobilized by a local committee representing the Partisan movement, the Yugoslav resistance (and incipient government-in-waiting). And planting gardens was a way of making the camp, a somewhat desolate place under pitiless sun, more agreeable. ‘The important thing is, they’re green: a bit of Yugoslavia in the middle of the desert.’ More, it was a way for the residents to make the exterior spaces of the camp their own, just as making artificial flowers out of wire and scraps of paper to decorate the interior of a tent was a way of turning a shelter into a home.
Gardening must have started quickly. Evacuees arrived at El Shatt in early 1944, fifteen thousand by the end of April, later rising to over twenty-five thousand. But by the time photographer Otto Gilmore visited the camp in September 1944, plants in a garden he photographed were already above shoulder height. Evacuees didn’t know how long they would stay before returning home, or whether they would be moved on (as many other European refugees from Nazism had been) to camps in British-colonized east Africa or south Asia. They began gardening nonetheless.
How many gardens? It’s hard to be sure. The gardens are a prominent feature in a range of visual sources for life at El Shatt, produced by both visitors and residents. Otto Gilmore was sent by the US Office of War Information to document the camp as responsibility for it passed from the British military humanitarian agency MERRA to the joint Allied agency UNRRA. A team from the British Ministry of Information also arrived in the camp in September 1944 and spent weeks making a twenty-minute film about the residents, The Star and the Sand: the gardens are the focus of one scene but appear in passing in several other exterior shots. (The film was screened repeatedly in the camp itself.) Phyllis Mackenzie worked at El Shatt as an UNRRA welfare officer. An artist trained at the Slade in London, she made many drawings and paintings at the camp, including the first image in this post, dated ’44. And tent gardens feature in a rich visual source produced by and for the evacuees themselves. Početnica 1945 is a simple primer for children in the camp, using illustrations of the camp itself as its educational materials. A line drawing at the back of the book clearly shows a plot marked around a tent, and gardens feature prominently in the images C for Cvijet (‘flower’) and Z for Zmija (‘Snake, snake!’). In The Star and the Sand we see a gardener with a spade, and in the book illustrations we see the gardens being watered. The camp’s water supply was relatively good, water towers having already been constructed when it was an army camp. Its availability placed an upper limit on the number of people El Shatt could accommodate, but it was evidently sufficient for water to be used in gardening. As for the watering cans, they were probably made at the camp itself from discarded petrol cans, the basic unit of metalwork production.
Different images in different visual media, produced by people in different relations to the camp and held in different public and private archives. No doubt there are more images of the tent gardens to be found in other collections too. So there were probably quite a few gardens, though it’s hard to be sure. They don’t feature so prominently in the written sources I’ve consulted so far, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t present and numerous: I’ve mostly looked at ‘official’ sources concerned with the ‘official’ running of the camp, and the tent gardens were made at the refugees’ own initiative. Still, the prevalence of these gardens in the visual record for the camp, which may overrepresent them, is striking. What might explain it?
A garden in a refugee camp is a powerful thing. Encampment is meant to be a temporary state of affairs, but anyone who plants a garden is thinking long-term, of seasons and years rather than weeks and months. People living in camps are usually perceived by outsiders and by camp authorities, and depicted by them, as passive recipients of humanitarian assistance. But people who make a garden are doing something for themselves. And a characteristic feature of the historical record for El Shatt, at least in the period when the evacuees were living there (1944–46), is the emphasis on the agency of the residents—not ‘refugees’ in the usual helpless and needy sense but allies, and indeed Allies, in a shared struggle against fascism. The narration of The Star and the Sand is an extremely rich example of this, but is is also the general tone of many unpublished archival sources and later testimonies. (This is unusual: it’s often that case that internal documentation on camps expresses considerable frustration, to say the least, with insufficiently cooperative residents, even if the camp authorities publicly stress how ‘deserving’ they are.) Showing that the evacuees had made gardens of the desert was a way of stressing what they were making of themselves.
One question that remains, for me, relates to how gardens in refugee camps are written about, especially by people who don’t live in refugee camps. Refugee camps have gardens. Sometimes they’re official, from the 300-acre forage farm at Baquba near Baghdad in 1918–20 to the household plots on agricultural resettlement colonies in Tanzania or Mexico in the 1980s. Sometimes they’re unofficial, like the tent gardens at El Shatt. Often they’re a mixture of both: at Domiz in Iraqi Kurdistan, people fleeing from the Syrian civil war rapidly started gardening, in the most basic sense by filling cans with earth to to grow plants in, but a programme set up by the international NGO the Lemon Tree Trust has also established a large communal garden. It seems reasonable to assume that refugee camps will contain gardens unless residents are actively prevented from making them. But writing about refugee camps often introduces gardens as a surprising aspect of camp life, and people advocating for gardening to be incorporated into camp planning and management keep talking (and keep having to talk) about it as a new thing, something that should be done more systematically. Here, I think, we see two related things at work. The first is the way the very term ‘refugee’ itself works as a dehumanizing category, such that anything refugees do beyond speechlessly beseeching assistance seems surprising. (That’s why I’ve used the term ‘residents’ here instead, and will try to do so in future writing about camps.) The other is the way the planning and management of refugee camps so often works to make residents into mere ‘refugees’, such that every proposal for residents to live with ordinary dignity must be a battle fought anew.
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Sources
Words
‘Sour ground’: ‘Information requested by Refugee Camp Unit Bureau of Areas on El Shatt Camp’, survey response by S.K. Jacobs, n.d. UN Archives, S-1264-0000-0054-00001, quote p11 of PDF (p9 of document).
‘Tea leaves and cinders’, ‘The maize seldom ripens…’, ‘The important thing is…’: The Star and the Sand, dir. Gilbert Gunn (Ministry of Information, 1944). Imperial War Museum, London, https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060022213, quotes at reel 1, 6’35”-6’50”.
Images
Phyllis Mackenzie painting: www.phyllismackenzie.co.uk, a website maintained by Mackenzie’s son (copyright retained by the family).
Otto Gilmore photograph: ‘Melons abound in Egypt, and children keep the pips to make gardens grown in front of tents in UNRRA’s biggest refugee camp in the Middle East where there are 20,000 living under canvas.’ Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/fsa.8d37950/
Still from The Star and the Sand: as above.
Illustrations from Početnica 1945 [Spelling book 1945]. UN Archives, S-1449-0000-0120-00001, p18 of PDF (p16 of book) for ‘Zmija zmija’, 24 of PDF (22 of book) for ‘Cvijet’, 40 of PDF (38 of book) for line drawing.
NB I have tried to include alt text for all images, but I can’t tell if this is functional for the tiled gallery. Feedback welcome.
Acknowledgments
This post is thinking for a book I’m working on with Katherine Mackinnon, whose excellent research identified many of the sources here. It builds on the earlier work of Baher Ibrahim, who produced this very useful research guide [PDF] to refugee settlement and encampment in the Middle East and North Africa, 1860s-1940s.
Women in a tent at El Shatt refugee camp, Egypt, September 1944. Photo by Otto Gilmore. Source: Library of Congress.
In Otto Gilmore’s photos of the El Shatt refugee camp in Egypt, stout bamboo tentpoles are a prominent feature. Gilmore, a photographer with the US Office of War Information, visited in September 1944, when the camp had been operational for several months and was nearing its maximum population of over 25,000 people. It was made up of three subcamps set a few kilometres apart, plus a few satellite installations like a labour camp and transport depot. The site was a former British army rear camp, chosen to accommodate evacuees from Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia because it had some important infrastructure already in place: road access, a few brick and concrete buildings that could house camp services, and, crucially, water towers. But it quickly outgrew these origins, sprawling out in a sea of tents—mostly EPIP tents, ‘English Personnel Indian Pattern’, a military tent used for British soldiers in the Indian Army. (Tents of this model had accommodated refugees a generation earlier at Baquba in occupied Mesopotamia at the end of the first world war.) The camp’s explosive growth in the early summer of 1944 meant that by the time subcamp 3 was being erected, and additional water towers built to supply it, the supply of EPIP tents had run out and the camp was completed with smaller 180lb tents that got hotter in the sun. Tents were the basic unit of construction at El Shatt. They accommodated most of the military and humanitarian personnel working there as well as the residents themselves, though the camp staff lived in individual tents while the residents shared doubled tents, about 18 people in each. Bigger internal spaces, for use as hospitals, churches, or schools, were created by putting more tents together. Gilmore took photos of all of these, and in many of them you can see the hefty tentpoles that held up heavy canvas outers and many layers of internal lining. But that’s not all they were used for.
El Shatt was a site of hive-like industry and great material scarcity. The residents had brought little stuff with them, and clothes, shoes, and other basic necessities were in short supply. Workshops of all kinds were quickly set up, partly to give residents something to do but also to produce the things they needed. Residents also worked informally to make things for themselves. Some raw materials, as well as finished goods like clothing, came from military surplus. The arrival of the evacuees in spring 1944 was nicely timed, because by then Egypt was no longer a theatre of active conflict itself—the war, and Allied armies had moved elsewhere, so stuff was available (including all those tents) that wouldn’t have been earlier. Military detritus was also an important resource: old tyres were cut down into soles for sandals, while empty petrol cans were the main source of metal for the workshops. There were found objects, like driftwood gathered from the nearby Suez Canal and turned into furniture or toys. And there were the tents themselves. For the residents, partial disassembly of the tents in which they lived could be the first step in the production process for any number of thing, from clothing—and even the tools to make it—to musical instruments.
Dragoslava Williams’s spindle, made from a bamboo tent pole at El Shatt refugee camp. Source: Migration Heritage Centre, New South Wales.
Dragoslava Williams, née Stojanovic, lived at El Shatt as a child. She and her family, who had fled Yugoslavia in 1939 and crossed Europe and the Middle East during the war years, arrived in 1946, when the camp’s population had changed. The evacuees from the Dalmatian coast, politically mobilized (and semi-autonomously governed) by representatives of the Partisan movement, were on their way home. But her family could not return to communist Yugoslavia: her father had served in the Royal Yugoslav Army. So they stayed at El Shatt for two years, until they were resettled to Australia in 1948. Interviewed decades later, she recalled her father whittling a piece of a bamboo tent pole into a spindle for her so she could make knitting twine out of wool. Families in the camp would unravel the ‘soft, sock like fabric’ that the poles were covered in to embroider, knit, or crochet. Residents would sacrifice layers of the internal linings that insulated the tents to make clothes for themselves. Dragoslava’s father also whittled a recorder for himself, and would play Serbian folk melodies for her to dance to. The gendered division of labour here might seem too obvious, the father manufacturing a tool for his daughter to work with and an instrument for himself to play: no doubt he worked too. But as in other refugee camps around the world before and since, work at El Shatt was highly gendered, not just in the spaces where it was done (the ‘home’ tent or the communal washing table versus the workshop) but in the materials women and men worked with (fabric and thread versus metal and wood).
Anyone who has read more than one or two accounts of life in a refugee camp will have encountered the discourse or refugee entrepreneurialism—a stress on the busyness, industry, and (potential) economic productivity of refugees. It is the shadow of another discourse, of refugee apathy and lethargy, which it exists to combat: the active, go-getting entrepreneur as opposed to the passive, sit-and-wait recipient of humanitarian handouts. At El Shatt, the discourse of refugee entrepreneurialism focused—and continues to focus in historical accounts—on the range and quality of goods that residents were able to produce from scant, scavenged, or ad hoc materials. Beyond whatever truths about living and working at El Shatt claims like these may contain or conceal, they’re worth thinking about for the work that they themselves are doing. For former residents, stressing how active and ingenious ‘we’ were—’so resourceful and talented that the English were in awe what we had made’—was perhaps a way of offsetting the loss of agency of being stuck in a camp. (It surely reflects the truth that life in the camp was tedious.) But the emphasis on industry and ingenuity in contemporary sources written by camp officials, as well as their later recollections, was also a way of representing the Dalmation evacuees not merely as ‘refugees’ but as allies, indeed Allies: Yugoslavia was ‘the only occupied country to field an above-ground organized anti-fascist team’. This ‘team’ was the Partisan movement, which under Allied supervision more or less governed the camp. Making object (shoes, shovels, guitars, sculptures) out of the stuff of the camp was a metaphor for making a state out of a scattered and occupied people: ‘building Yugoslavia in the sand’.
Sources
A recorder made in the 1940s by Dragoslava Williams’s father from a bamboo tent pole at El Shatt refugee camp. Source: Migration Heritage Centre, New South Wales.
Otto Gilmore’s photographs can be viewed on the Library of Congress website. Descriptions of life at El Shatt are taken from UNRRA records at the UN Archives, including the ‘History of the Middle East Office‘ produced by the Office of the Historian as well as documentation on the camp. The interview with Dragoslava Williams is linked in the text. The quote from the former resident ‘M.V.’ is from Gabi Abramac, ‘Dalmatian WWII Refugees in El Shatt, Egypt: Narratives of Sanctuary and Suffering’, in Anisa Hasanhodžić and Rifet Rustemović, Being a Refugee. A European Narrative (Vienna, 2018) pp85–106. The quote about the ‘above-ground organized anti-fascist team’ is from ‘Information requested by refugee camp unit Bureau of Areas on EL SHATT CAMP, by S.K Jacobs, Field Organiser UNRRA, Cairo, Egypt’, p37, in this folder of the UNRRA records. And ‘Building Yugoslavia in the sand’ is from the title of a recent article by Florian Bieber.
Acknowledgments
This post is part of my work towards a book with Katherine Mackinnon, whose excellent research identified most of the sources here. It builds on the earlier work of Baher Ibrahim, which produced this very useful research guide [PDF] to refugee settlement and encampment in the Middle East and North Africa, 1860s-1940s.
One of the things I’m thinking about for a current book project is how the ground that a refugee camp stands on affects the lives that its residents live there. In autumn 1918, unusually heavy rain turned the beaten-earth tracks of the Baquba refugee camp near Baghdad into deep mud. It was impassable for the ox-carts that delivered rations to the over 40,000 residents of the camp, and for the cars that transported anyone suspected of contagious disease to hospital. Consequences like this often result from the interaction of a camp and its inhabitants, the ground beneath them, and the weather: consider the news reports from modern-day camps like the Calais ‘Jungle’ or Moria on Lesbos. They often trigger or contribute to interventions by the authorities to improve matters, though on the authorities’ terms. At Baquba, a light rail system was installed along the camp’s main thoroughfares. This was not for the residents’ convenience: the British army of occupation in Mesopotamia, which ran the camp, did it for its own purposes of supply and disease control. The degraded and muddy conditions at the Calais ‘Jungle’ a century later, and international media reporting on them, triggered the partial then full clearance of the site by the French state, and its transformation into a nature reserve—measures that had nothing to do with the residents’ welfare.
Camps are sometimes built on sand, and this poses particular problems. The St Luke’s camp at Haifa in British mandate Palestine was one of many across North Africa and the Middle East managed by Allied relief agencies during the 1940s. (The book is about these camps.) It was on the coast, and its tents were pitched on sand: ‘whole camp would be washed away after a heavy rainstorm’, a field report noted. Other camps run by the Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration (MERRA), later absorbed into the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), were built on different sand, desert rather than beach. At Khatatba in Egypt, the sand created harsh conditions for the camp’s children, disproportionate (as is often the case) among a population of Yugoslavs who had fled German occupation: ‘the sand scorches their feet and fills their lungs with dust’. Sick children were sent to the camp at Tolumbat, on the coast near Alexandria, a former army convalescent camp where the air was better and the ground less hostile, though prone to flooding.
The largest of all the MERRA/UNRRA camps, at El Shatt near the Suez canal, was also built on desert sand. It was actually made up of three quite widely separated subcamps connected by a tarmac road and some wire-mesh desert tracks: ‘a good deal of the intra-camp traffic takes off on its own on the desert trying to avoid soft sand, tents, and small Yugoslavs’. The sandy ground was not just a problem for supply trucks. Its tenuous soil ecology lacked the micro-organisms, small creatures, and plants that might break down organic matter. It was ‘sour ground’, having been much pissed on by the residents and the servicemen who preceded them (El Shatt had previously been a rear camp for British and British imperial forces).
Camps built on sand often have sanitation problems. Well into El Shatt’s time hosting refugees, the tents in one of its three subcamps still lacked any floors, which made sanitation ‘inefficient’, as a report noted with some understatement.
It is difficult to instil a feeling for home cleanliness to people who sleep or sit all day long in the sand. Moreover a lot of water is used to wet down the sand, a practice which is perfectly logical to both the refugee who dislikes sand blowing about, and to the fly who in interested in increasing his number.
A few years earlier, when several hundred thousand Spanish Republican refugees fled over the Pyrenees into France before the victorious fascist army, the French government disarmed them and sent men of military age to harsh encampments on the beaches of the Roussillon, with little more than barbed wire for shelter. Exposed to the winter weather, they were left very vulnerable. And sanitary conditions were dreadful: they had to wash their clothes in sea water, and it’s hard to dig an effective latrine trench in sand. The Haifa camp, which was intended to care for its residents rather than contain and discipline them, may have stood on sand, but it had chemical toilets.
Gibli, gibli, friends, the children shout. Where is our Area G? We can’t see anything Here it is, here it is, friends, this is what it says. Mom, dad, friends, where are you? It will take our tents away. Let’s tighten the ropes! Gibli, gibli !
But residents of camps have their own experiences of sand, and they aren’t always negative. Dragoslava Williams, née Stojanovic, spent most of her childhood in displacement, leaving Yugoslavia with her family in 1939 at the age of 3 and travelling down the Danube then through Russia and the Caucasus into the Middle East. They reached Egypt in 1945, and went first to the UNRRA camp at El Arish on the Mediterranean coast. Interviewed some sixty years later, she still remembered its ‘beautiful sand’. From there the family went to El Shatt, where they spent three years before emigrating to Australia in 1948. Like other Yugoslavs who lived in El Shatt after the war, they could not return to a Yugoslavia that was now under communist rule: Draga’s father was a royalist. But the Yugoslavs who had lived there in 1944–45, and did go home as the war ended, were highly mobilized in support of the communist Partisans, and self-governed (under British military supervision) by Partisan representatives. Children living in the camp in these years had learned Serbo-Croat from a colourful primer that illustrated the letter G with ‘gibli’ [Arabic qiblī], the name of the south wind heavy with desert sand. The illustration shows two children caught in a sandstorm whose wind threatens to lift the roof off a tent, by a sign marked ‘Area G’. Other Yugoslav children learned from the sand in an even more literal sense: at Tolumbat, pencils, pens, and paper were scarce, and reserved for older children. Younger children learned their letters by shaping them in sand. Josef Radic taught the geography of Dalmatia by making a relief map in sand.
Over time, camp residents could begin to transform the soil ecology of the camp. At El Shatt, residents used low sand embankments to demarcate the ‘gardens’ of individual tents. Children kept melon pips and planted them in little raised beds held in by sand or bricks. (These are shown in the photo at the top of the post.) Even in the harshly punitive camp for Spanish Republicans at Argelès-sur-mer in 1939, the sand offered some possibilities to residents. The photo below, taken in February or March of that year by a French garde mobile named Albert Belloc, shows men in the camp resting in holes they had dug out of the sand, to provide at least some shelter for themselves.
How else does the ground beneath a camp affect the lives people live in it? There’s plenty more to think about here.
Acknowledgments
I’m working on this book with Katherine Mackinnon, whose excellent research identified most of the sources here. It builds on the earlier work of Baher Ibrahim, which produced this very useful research guide [PDF] to refugee settlement and encampment in the Middle East and North Africa, 1860s-1940s.
Sources: quotes
Haifa
Untitled survey, ‘Name of camp: Haifa’, compiled 6/8/44 (ie June 8 1944, I think) based on documents produced in 1943. UN Archives, S-1263-0000-0008-00001, quote at p14 of PDF.
Khatatba
‘Second Report on Khatatba Camp for Yugoslav Refugees’. Ida McNare, American Red Cross, Khatatba, to Charles Bailey, director, ARC Middle East Operations, 9 Sept 1944. UN Archives, S-1264-0000-0057-00001, quote at p2 of PDF.
El Shatt
‘Information requested by Refugee Camp Unit Bureau of Areas on El Shatt Camp’, survey response by S.K. Jacobs, n.d. UN Archives, S-1264-0000-0054-00001, quotes respectively on pp31-32 of PDF (pp30–31 of document), p11 of PDF (p9 of document), p13 of PDF (p11 of document).
Sources: images
‘Melons abound in Egypt, and children keep the pips to make gardens grown in front of tents in UNRRA’s biggest refugee camp in the Middle East where there are 20,000 living under canvas.’ Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/fsa.8d37950/
Početnica 1945 [Spelling book 1945]. UN Archives, S-1449-0000-0120-00001, p32 of PDF (p30 of book).
I wrote this review essay for an academic journal, but it got stalled: the journal had slowed its production schedule as a result of the pandemic; the essay was too long to be published without substantial cuts; the editors very sensibly wanted a review of the book by someone with lived experience of seeking refuge to accompany this review by an academic, but had trouble finding that person. The coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying restrictions on international travel, many of which have not been lifted for people seeking refuge, have probably made the book (even more) obsolete anyway. But I wanted to get the essay out into the world nonetheless, especially for the second half, on the uses of utopian fiction in refugee policymaking, so I’m publishing it here on my own blog. It is also available on my institutional e-repository [link to follow] and in a permanently archived version on Archive.org.
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Front cover of Cohen and Van Hear, Refugia. Click image for source.
Refugia: Radical Solutions to Mass Displacement. Robin Cohen and Nicholas Van Hear. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. ISBN 9781138601567 (pb); 148 pages, 2 b/w illustrations; £34.99.
The past few years have seen a flurry of proposals to reform the international refugee regime, ranging in scale and complexity from a tweet—Egyptian telecoms billionaire Naguib Sawiris’s offer to buy a Mediterranean island from Greece or Italy and put refugees there—to full-length books like Alexander Betts and Paul Collier’s Refuge,which proposed to dismantle the entire rights-based regime built around the 1951 refugee convention (White 2019). Robin Cohen and Nick Van Hear’s Refugia falls somewhere in the middle, like T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Leah Zamore’s The Arc of Protection: punchy little books of about 150 pages, designed to be read and digested quickly by policymakers, humanitarian practitioners, and activists. Like these other books, Refugia starts with the now standard claim that record numbers of people are being displaced, of whom a shrinking proportion can hope to find a ‘durable solution’ while an overstretched refugee system keeps the rest in humanitarian limbo. How can this situation be resolved? Cohen and Van Hear engage in utopian thinking to produce a ‘social science fiction’ in which a transnational global polity of refugees, wrought by the efforts of refugees themselves, emerges. This is not so much a proposal to reform or replace the current refugee regime as an effort to imagine a better world that, they hope, might be within our reach—in as little as a decade, if only refugees will grasp it for us.
The project was familiar to researchers and practitioners in the field long before the book came out: the authors presented their ideas widely, in person and in writing. An earlier version was the subject of a round table in the inaugural issue of Migration & Society: Advances in Research, where Van Hear presented the idea in outline, with critical responses from Véronique Barbelet and Christine Bennett at the Humanitarian Policy Group and Helma Lutz of Goethe University Frankfurt (Van Hear et al. 2018). Barbelet and Bennett observed that the idea ‘imagines a solution where refugees survive but do not thrive’, proposing a technical fix that does not address refugees’ structural economic, legal, and social precarity. Lutz noted that the plan ignored differences between refugees (who may include perpetrators as well as victims of persecution), said nothing about how Refugia’s people would reach agreement on how to achieve a ‘just’ society, and left unanswered the question of the economic system it would adopt. None of these issues is resolved in the book-length version of the argument. Quite the opposite: it builds the dream palace of technical fixes to even loftier heights, while the gaps in its foundations yawn ever wider. But it’s worth returning to this longer version of the argument, for two reasons. First, at some risk of flogging a dead horse, the book-length problems merit an essay-length critique, lest any of those policymakers, practitioners, or activists be tempted to lend Refugia more credence than it warrants. Second, a key point about Cohen and Van Hear’s project that those earlier critiques did notaddress is its use of fiction as a means of rethinking refugee protection—that is, its literary imagination. This deserves critical reflection, though not because it redeems Refugia (spoiler: it doesn’t). Taking Refugia seriously as fiction sharpens our understanding of the plan’s problems, bringing the authors’ preconceptions and motivations into clearer focus than a discussion limited to their academic/policy analysis. And it helps us think about how this tool for making a better future might be put to better use.
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‘Refugee Republic’: a project on Domiz camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, a real-life camp rather than one of Cohen and Van Hear’s ‘refugiums’ (click image for source)
The book begins with a scene-setting prelude, ‘Refugia 2030’, that imagines this ‘loosely connected archipelago’ (2) consolidating itself in a hostile environment of the near future. The rich world is increasingly polarized between ‘metropolitan, liberal megacities’ (1) and ‘authoritarian national governments’ rooted in small towns and the countryside; the poor world is plagued by ‘identity conflicts [sic] fuelled by ethnic, nationalist, and religious loyalties’ (1). But hope is to be found in over 300 ‘refugiums’: self-governing communities of refugees licensed or tolerated ‘by the nation-states or local authorities within whose territories they lie’ (2), which the authors call ‘Somewherelands’. Self-governed by a kind of direct democracy, this confederacy uses a blockchain-based technology known as the Sesame Pass to grant its residents, Refugians, certain entitlements and rights, like the right of movement. Refugees, in other words, have taken responsibility for themselves from the states that host them. Economically, Refugia flourishes thanks to its inhabitants’ skills ‘in cultural and creative industries, education, and digital commerce and services’ (3), and agreements on employment and tax-sharing negotiated with the Somewhereland governments. No single refugium becomes overloaded because an algorithmic ‘Capacity Rating’—devised ‘by Refugian digital specialists wary of covert control by the technology corporations’ (4)—keeps track of how many people it can support at any one time. Politically and economically open, Refugia stands as an incipient challenge to the nation-state.
From this bold vision, the book proceeds in two strands. The main strand is a more conventional academic argument, with an introduction (chapter 1), a discussion of theoretical underpinnings (ch2), a review of existing reform plans (ch3), and two chapters considering prefigurations of Refugia in today’s world (ch4) and discussing how to make it work in practice (ch5). A final chapter summarizes the argument and engages with its critics. Alongside this runs the minor strand, of fictional ‘vignettes’ that follow each chapter and imagine an episode somewhere in Refugia in the years 2027–30. I’ll discuss the academic argument before returning to its literary avatar.
The theoretical underpinnings of Refugia, according to chapter 2, lie in an effort to think beyond the nation-state, ‘an orthodoxy reinforced by everything from passports to sporting competitions’ (31). Why is this necessary? The nation-state is problematic on many grounds. No state is in reality the political expression of a single national community. In the real world, many other ‘power containers’ (16) vie with nation-states for dominance, from corporations to religions to super-wealthy individuals. Stateless nations seeking states are a destabilizing force, while the creation of a new nation-state generates new problems, as the examples of Israel and South Sudan show. ‘[T]he territorial nation-state may have reached its historical limits’ (18), and in any case, ‘fixed ascribed identities (ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, or national)’ are ‘increasingly seen as irritating, irrelevant, or even oppressive’ (20). Citing, but misspelling, Zygmunt Bauman, the authors say that modern identities are liquid, based on elective affinities as much as primordial ascriptions, and liable to agglutination and change.
If all this sounds rather vague, that’s because it is: a superficial swirl through some relevant social theory that glances off its references rather than seriously engaging with the texts or systematically reflecting on their relevance (or not) to the subject. Frustrating throughout the chapter is the authors’ stubborn refusal to recognize that in every sphere that they cite to show that the nation-state can be transcended, states play a powerful role. You don’t need to be an ‘ardent nationalist’ (19) to see this. Corporations rely on states to discipline labour, regulate markets, and (often) provide direct or indirect subsidies. Global religions operate everywhere in dialogue with states: they may be ‘power containers’ distinct from states, but they are not wholly autonomous of them. Social identities, whether ascriptive or elective, are everywhere enframed by the regulatory frameworks of states, and their repressive or ideological apparatuses. States do not determine these things, but they do shape them. The ‘archipelagic thinking’ that the authors borrow from Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau needs to be thought through in this context. Transnational entities do not transcend states but are made by them: consider the actually existing archipelagos of humanitarian containment, or of tax havens and freeports. And none of this speculation about nation-states is coherently articulated to the brief discussions of the ‘mobile commons’ and ‘homemaking on the move’ that follow.
The authors end chapter 2 by stressing the necessity of utopian thinking, but they make the very odd claim that ‘with the collapse of nearly all Socialist experiments, utopian thinking went out of fashion’ (30). But free market utopianism literally declared ‘the end of history’ when the Soviet bloc collapsed, and the decades since then have been deeply marked by other utopianisms, from the techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley venture capitalists to the Islamic State. To be clear: all of the thinkers discussed in this chapter offer useful ways of thinking about our world, that could help us imagine a better future (for everyone, refugees included). Utopianism as method for scholar-activists is also not just valid but necessary, in a time when powerholders within an intellectually entrenched political economy insist that there is no alternative even as it generates insoluble political and ecological crises. But this chapter does not convincingly show how its theoretical references relate to the making of Refugia, and its refusal to engage with reality makes its utopianism idle rather than generative.
Chapter 3 discusses other proposals for reforming the refugee regime, from the relatively cautious (Aleinikoff and Zamore) to the would-be radical (Betts and Collier) to the wild-eyed and speculative (Jason Buzi’s ‘Refugee Nation’; Naguib Sawiris’s island).[1] Cohen and Van Hear attempt to extract the best ideas from this assortment, which obliges them to give a more sympathetic hearing than they merit to proposals that are merely the self-indulgent fantasies of wealthy men, or actively and intentionally harmful to refugees. But they do not discuss the most obvious failing all these schemes share: not one of them is led by refugees themselves, and most if not all have been put forward without any evidence of participation by or direct consultation with refugees. ‘Nothing about us without us’ is a key message of many refugee groups, as the authors note (62): it’s one that these reform plans, especially the more grandiose ones, have ignored. (The Bangladeshi government actually has built an artificial island to accommodate Rohingya refugees, who have done their best to avoid the nightmarish isolation and vulnerability it exposes them to [UN Bangladesh 2020; Strangio 2021].) The authors end the chapter by saying that ‘real engagement by refugees in any plan and a sense that they are in charge will be necessary to its success’ (55). This is true, but it needs more than a passing mention: the absence of any such engagement is a fundamental weakness of the ‘alternative visions’ they discuss. Cohen and Van Hear don’t exempt themselves from this criticism, but that raises the question of why they haven’t acted on it. As far as I can tell, they don’t cite a single refugee. Even Betts and Collier managed more than that, and only one of the refugees in their book was fictional.
What are the ‘prefigurations’ of Refugia in the present? Another hotchpotch. Chapter 4 ranges from migrant diasporas to UNRWA, from Rojava to urban squats. The authors are keen to show that transnational representative structures can work, and that ‘direct democracy’ is viable for communal government at scale. But they don’t dwell long enough on their examples to face any difficult questions: whether an organization like the World Jewish Congress is really representative (and is really a transnational alternative to the nation-state); whose voices are heard and whose are not in ‘direct democracies’ like Rojava or Hotel Oniro; how to articulate local and transnational experiments if not through the intermediary of the nation-state (and Rojava is surely an aspiring nation-state); or, crucially, how power is allocated in all these examples, how divergent interests are reconciled and conflicts managed. These examples all deserved a more sustained, less rose-tinted discussion, and a more coherently organized one too. They contain interesting and even inspiring possibilities for the future, but they also offer many warnings. Would a Palestinian recommend UNRWA as a ‘model of transnational governance’ (61), for example? Perhaps, if it had more Palestinians at its senior levels. But I think most would prefer a Palestinian state.
Chapter 5, ‘Making Refugia work’, is the heart of the book. The essence of Refugia, the authors say, is ‘reaching for a good society’ (81), which Refugians will achieve by ‘engagement with the known community’ (82) of other displaced people (and ‘solidarians’). Their idea of ‘known community’ takes inspiration from ‘the ancient Greek notion of the agora, the open place, the gathering place, the assembly, where people meet to shop, market, buy and sell, socialize, and exchange ideas’ (82)—though they fail to mention that classical Greece was a congeries of slave societies that placed sharp limits on participation in the polis, notably excluding women. And this vision of frictionless ‘engagement’ is not so much utopian as reductive, making refugees into an undifferentiated mass and denying them their individual and collective histories. Having misrepresented global south conflicts as ‘identity conflicts’ on the first page of the book, they now expect Refugians to slough off their prior identities—that is, their histories—and build a new collective identity rooted in the shared experience of displacement. But that is not how displacement works on the process of social identity formation. As Peter Gatrell has shown, drawing on Liisa Malkki’s anthropological work, time and again in refugee history displacement has indeed been a crucible for identity formation, but always working with, and often intensifying, what was already present (Gatrell 2013; Malkki 1996). Displacement is far more likely to stimulate nationalist political mobilizations among existing collectivities, and intensify their territorial aspirations, than produce a commitment to the kind of feelgood transnational collectivity that Cohen and Van Hear would like to see. If reading Gatrell and Malkki was too much—neither is cited—then paying attention to the experiences of almost any group of refugees would have told the authors this. There is no reason why different groups embarked on a journey of displacement, along the same route or not, should develop ‘inter-group support’, or ‘trust and confidence [and] permanent cooperation’ (85). Neither the trauma of displacement nor the ‘resilience’ learned on the journey point towards the development of a transnational identity, and nor does the third element they posit, ‘homemaking’ in exile. They develop this at some length, albeit fuzzily. In part they argue for Refugians to engage in a kind of DIY city-building, with ‘constituent assemblies in each refugium to consider’—and build—‘customized site-and-services schemes’ (84). More is needed, though, than mere bricks, mortar, and fibre-optic cables, and a ‘gendered approach to home-making’ will apparently provide this. But the authors do not articulate their second quick skim of studies on the gendered experience of displacement with their account of the ‘self-organization, democratic discussion, and representation’ that will allow Refugians to thrive.
The logical next step would be a discussion of governance within Refugia, but instead there follow sections on solidarity movements and the authors’ vision for Refugia’s technological underpinnings. Although their aspiration for Somewherelander ‘solidarians’ to sign up and become Refugians themselves is questionable, the first of these is worth discussing: solidarity work, provided it knows its place, is surely a helpful complement to any successful effort for refugee self-organization. But the second is where the book’s utopian thinking stumbles, with a vertiginous lack of critical reflection, into a dystopia that could all too easily happen, with the book’s biggest concrete idea: the Sesame Pass, or rather the Sesame Pass/App/Chip. In order to document refugees’ identities, provide work permits for Somewhereland employment, enable international travel, ensure access to entitlements such as education and housing, allocate ‘creds’ within the Capacity Rating system, and grant voting rights within each refugium and in Refugia as a whole, Cohen and Van Hear propose an ambitious tech solution. All of these functions will be encoded on a single card (Pass), then a smartphone (App), and ultimately a subcutaneous implant (Chip).
It is ironic, in a sick kind of way, that the authors think they are transcending the nation-state with this disastrously bad idea: the Sesame Chip takes all the practices modern nation-states have developed to manage their relationship with their populations down to individual level, bundles them all into a single technology more intrusive than even the most authoritarian state has yet dared, and literally implants them into the bodies of individual refugees. Cohen and Van Hear airily note that this technology will need to be kept out of the hands of the technology corporations. But they offer no explanation of how their brave transnational archipelago will procure, install, and run the mammoth infrastructure required to underpin this enormously sophisticated system, nor how individual refugiums will develop the judicial, administrative, or medical infrastructure to implant the chips in Refugian arms, or reset, renew, or replace ‘damaged, stolen, or penetrated Passes’ (93). Whose problems is the Sesame Pass solving? Not those of refugees. One motivation is the need to securely identify individual Refugians to offset the ‘fear of terrorists posing as refugees’ that figures in ‘much of the anti-refugee and anti-migrant rhetoric in Somewherelands’ (93). The authors don’t seem to realize that by insisting on a coercive control measure for refugees they are not dissipating but consolidating this racist rhetoric, and handing hostile actors (states or others) an immensely powerful tool to use against refugees. This is intellectually negligent: Cohen and Van Hear ignore the extensive critical literature on ‘surveillance capitalism’ and its exploitative relationship with refugees (Madianou 2019; Achiume 2020; Lemberg-Pedersen and Haioty 2020; Weitzberg 2020). But more than that, it is morally negligent. It is perhaps the most outstanding example of the sheer irresponsibility that characterizes the whole book.
One objection to this line of criticism might be that the book is social science fiction, and the authors can be forgiven a little starry-eyed fantasy. But even if we set aside their programmatic real-world intentions, their fiction fails. Good science fiction doesn’t simply invent currently impossible technologies (though the Sesame Chip is not far from being possible): it takes their implications seriously, including their moral and political implications, otherwise they are mere special effects. What would happen if certain individuals in a seismically unstable world had the power to still the trembling earth? They would be hated and feared as much as they were needed, as N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy shows (Jemisin 2015, 2016, 2017). A genuinely utopian fiction, or fictional utopia, might indeed be a better way of rethinking refugee protection than a policy brief. But a literary analysis of Cohen and Van Hear’s fictional vignettes is no more forgiving than a policy analysis of their proposals. Still, they deserve close attention, because this is where the authors show us Refugia as they imagine it, and show us the limits of their imagination.
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Simple image showing an SD card entering a disk drive, a hand holding a smartphone, and an open hand with an embedded microchip. Refugia, fig 5.1, ‘The Sesame Pass in three generations’.
The first vignette begins with a gong sounding at the Janat Refugium, somewhere (‘Somewhereland’) in North Africa—presumably Libya, from the reference to Cyrene architecture. ‘I declare the weekly agora of Janat open’, the new presiding officer says (12), ‘As we have decided in earlier meetings the agora will finish when the gong sounds in one and half hours, with all unfinished business to go to the next meeting.’ This sounds oddly like an academic departmental meeting, but the scene is the closest the book gets to giving us an account of how governance in Refugia might work, and politics is elided from the start. How was the ‘new presiding officer’ selected? How were these procedural decisions reached? ‘The agora had adapted an old Swahili proverb’, the authors tell us, ‘to describe their vibrant democracy: ‘Fugians sit under the tree and talk until they agree’.’(12) So we have a setting whose name harks back to classical Greek democracy, and an old Swahili proverb to describe its proceedings. We’re asked to take it on trust that this just works: that the question of participation has an easy answer, and that everyone can speak English. But like ancient Greece, the Swahili coasts in more recent times were a slave-owning society. These references are not as benign as the authors think.
Discussions start with ‘routine business’: the desalination plant needs attention. Fortunately, rather like a modern British university, Janat refugium has a ‘science cluster’ which can investigate. Meanwhile volunteers are needed to clean the filters, and two love-struck young Fugians offer to help out—more for the chance to spend some time together than for the 20 creds per day that will be added to their Sesame accounts. But what are their backgrounds? Do they share a language, are they with their families? Are they a straight couple or a gay couple? It is charming that everyone simply accepts that their love will bloom, but not remotely realistic. Compare the scenes in Ben Rawlence’s book about Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya that describe Monday and Muna, a Sudanese Christian man and Somali Muslim woman who meet in the camp (working for the German development agency) and marry. The result? Immediate threats of death against Muna and her unborn child from her family and wider clan, and a life of fear. ‘A community under threat is rarely known for its tolerance’, as Rawlence says (2016: 98).
The bigger question raised in this vignette is that of political inclusion, as Janat, with a Capacity Rating of 1,400 people and only 25 spare places, decides who to take in. Pregnant women already in the camp—sorry, ‘refugium’—are quickly assigned ten places, presumably for their unborn children. But then there’s a difficult and upsetting discussion. ‘Patrice’ speaks up on behalf of his cousin, using the Sesame Pass embedded in his arm to summon up gruesome holograms showing the torture she has experienced in her (presumably Francophone African) country. Is it likely that someone would exhibit images of a female relative’s tortured body to a gathering of strangers in order to gain her access to a place of refuge? Perhaps. It’s extremely demeaning, but she is accepted, along with her family: five places. Further discussions over the remaining places provoke tears, as people remember their own suffering. But what happens to the people who don’t get spaces—do they just disappear? Languish in Somewhereland-controlled detention centres? Two pages earlier, the authors have said ‘Refugia is governed highly democratically. If you have been displaced, you can sign up. You can join freely and leave freely.’ (10) But that is not true. Janat, like a nation-state, tries to control who can enter, and gain access to the benefits of belonging. Finally, the agora discusses two ‘solidarians’ who want to join, Ebba and Lars. Ebba is a Swedish woman’s name (I had to look it up); Lars is a common Germanic male name. I mention this because this first vignette of Refugian life names three individuals and only one of them is a refugee. The other two are Nordic voluntourists, who once helped search-and-rescue missions and now offer legal and social work services in Arabic and English. ‘Their applications to join Janat as full members were greeted enthusiastically’ (13): two places of refuge going to people who don’t need them.
This is all entirely implausible. It is also deeply patronizing, even dehumanizing, in its depiction of displaced people as cheerful, mostly unnamed positive thinkers who can all speak English, all get to speak, and always come to an agreement that everyone accepts. Displaced people are real people. They have their own strongly held values, opinions, beliefs; their own languages; their own, yes, identities, that shape their assessment of how to weigh up their individual advantage, collective belonging, and the collective good. If Refugia will not grant them that, then its political institutions are not going to work.
The next vignette is more embarrassing still. At the Refugium Tindouf—this is a real place, the Algerian desert town around which Sahrawi refugee camps have existed since the 1970s—the residents are wondering what to do about ‘a group of dishevelled Brexitanians, popularly known as ‘Johnsons’ (no-one knew why)’: a sorry sight, with their ‘pink-red skins and split lips’ (33). After a discussion, the Refugians agree that however sympathetic they may feel to these unfortunate escapees from ‘bankrupt Brexitania’, it’s best not to let them linger: by ‘a clear majority (52–48 per cent)’(34), they agree to let them stay temporarily then ask them to move on. With its smug little jokes (a ‘clear majority’ of 52–48 per cent—how amusing!), this vignette is not the only place in the book where Cohen and Van Hear seem more interested in settling scores in British political debates than in working for or with refugees. Take ‘Somewhereland’, the residual category against which Refugia defines itself. ‘We are not quite sure’, a note explains, ‘but suspect that the name Somewhereland is an ironic nod’ (6) to David Goodhart’s 2017 book The Road to Somewhere. You can see why Cohen and Van Hear might want to poke fun at this prominent publicist of the British right. But by using imagined ‘refugee activists’ as their tool to do so, they place (imaginary) refugees at the service of their own politics, rather than placing their imaginations at the service of refugees. Is all of Refugia just a Remainer fantasy?
The third vignette is the first which does not feature people from the global north. Cohen and Van Hear imply early on that by 2030 Refugia will include territories in the global north, but all the refugiums they actually take the time to imagine lie in the global south. This one is in Ghana, where a Ghanaian solidarian named Lariba is driving down the highway in a ‘solar’ with the Eritrean Tekle, a Refugian who has come to do voluntary service in another refugium: this is ‘nominally voluntary, but more or less expected’ (56). Here the authors do explicitly raise the issue of how Refugians communicate. But they haven’t put much thought into ‘Fugee, the creole that was developing across Refugia’ (56): Lariba and Tekle quickly default to English. In Refugia, imagined refugees have to work for us, switching to an English that the book’s presumed anglophone audience can understand without effort. (‘Hey Fuj, turn that down a moment. I can’t hear myself think’: it isn’t even a serious attempt to reproduce any of the diverse African Englishes.) Why not make us work instead? In Riddley Walker,Russell Hoban imagined a broken, ragged English that almost drags the reader—the book never departs from it—into a post-apocalyptic future England (Hoban 1980). A Fugee creole in which Refugians might imagine their own futures: that would open up far more radical possibilities than a fiction that constrains itself to the English of the seminar paper and policy brief. But you would need to listen to many more refugees for it to be convincing.
The next vignette introduces Dr Farid Abadi, ‘Skinny Doc’. Once a doctor in Aleppo, Farid is now a grateful Refugian, putting his medical training to good use: in the Elysia Refugium, he is ‘responsible for the subcutaneous insertion of a Sesame microchip into anyone who wanted their rights, creds (the currency), and access codes inserted into their arm—the ‘skinny’ option’ (78), hence his nickname. He has done this for two young women who stroll past him, Omni and Luna, and remembers them telling him ‘Don’t mess up our beautiful skins’, and adding ‘Only oldies still carry around cards and phones’ (78). Cohen and Van Hear are not alone, among writers of science fiction, in doing clunky dialogue. But good writers of science fiction think seriously about the consequences of their speculations, even if their dialogue is a bit cringe. Perhaps younger Refugians would rush to embrace the Sesame Chip, as we have all embraced smartphones, despite the invasive surveillance they bring—but no imagined Refugian is given a moment’s opportunity to suggest that the Sesame Chip might carry dangers into the bearer’s body.[2]
Omni and Luna’s names are even more problematic than their speech. They are newly-adopted names—‘universe names’, eeek—for two young women who were once ‘bewildered, traumatized souls… dumped at the refugium by some brusque Somewherelanders’ (78): nameless refugees, in other words, without individual stories or histories. By adopting new names, ‘like so many other Refugians’, they have ‘said goodbye to the religions and ethnicities of their forbears’ (78). We have already seen why it is so implausible, not to mention patronizing, to imagine away displaced people’s individual and collective histories and heritage like this. It also makes refugees responsible for their own predicament, by blaming their displacement on their own identities. And here, most clearly, we see what is really going on. As former refugees, Omni and Luna are not a plausible fiction. But they are all too easily understandable as a fantasy of two older white academics frightened by ‘identity politics’, as it plays out not in the conflict-prone global south but on campus. If they really cared about the politics of identity in ‘West Asia’ then they might have bothered to say more about what Omni and Luna had chosen to slough off, or to do some reading about Syria before inventing a Syrian character. Back in Aleppo, they say, ‘Maronites, Chaldeans, Armenians, and Syrians all came to Dr Abadi’s door.’ But the Maronites, Chaldeans, and Armenians of Aleppo were all Syrians, and those that remain there still are. If someone wrote about ‘Catholics, Baptists, Jews, and British’ in Birmingham, would we take their vision of a post-identitarian utopia seriously?
The final vignette takes us to a ‘workshop on creds and distributed ledger technology’ (99) in 2027, where brilliant Refugians from twenty different refugiums have gathered together to do magic—or they might as well have done. ‘Jennie the Génie’ sums up the state of play: Refugia has so far ‘issued 22.4 million digital identities through its Sesame card/app/chip’; 94 per cent of refugiums have adopted the ‘cred’ as currency, its name having ‘been shown to work well in a number of languages’; 97 per cent of refugiums have agreed that newcomers should be allocated ‘10,000 non-transferable creds’ on arrival (99). This is already impressive. The near-unanimity with which Refugians have agreed on complex issues of economic, social, and political entitlements resembles no democracy I have ever heard of. And their technological prowess in power generation must be even more phenomenal than their digital wizardry. The cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin, also based on distributed ledger technology, has existed since 2008. At time of writing nearly 19m Bitcoins have been ‘mined’, out of a total possible 21m. The processing power required to keep mining more and to produce and maintain a permanent and supposedly unfalsifiable record of transactions (the blockchain) is so immense that Bitcoin consumes as much electricity annually as a mid-sized nation-state like Argentina or Sweden. Bitcoin ‘mines’ tend to be located in places that are cold, so cooling the server stacks is cheaper, and/or where energy is cheap or subsidized: Iceland has cold weather and geothermal energy, China has subsidized electricity. The blockchain required to keep track of 22.4 million identities and transactions in billions of creds would dwarf that required to keep track of Bitcoin. Refugia, evidently, has found good places to keep its servers, and within a few years of its inauguration has an energy infrastructure—somewhere—that many nation-states would envy.
And things are about to get a lot more complicated. ‘Amamefuna’ and his team have identified 6,735 occupations in existing refugiums and assessed their ‘Community Benefit Ratings’ using 40 criteria—are they hard or easy, skilled or unskilled, prosaic or creative? Gliding over the fact that value judgments like these cannot be ‘objectively calculated’ (100) but are always subjectively determined in ways that usually reflect and reproduce existing social hierarchies, these ratings too are to be hung from the already groaning blockchain that carries the digital load of the Sesame Chip. Using an ‘updated version of Kuratowski’s theorem’, the delegates come up with an algorithm that automatically assigns creds for labour service ‘while eliminating the possibility of corruption and self-importance inflation’ (!). Refugia is fortunate indeed to have so many mathematical geniuses skilled enough to devise algorithms that can simply sweep aside all knotty political and economic problems, and civic-minded enough not to go and get lucrative jobs with Google instead. ‘And, hey, I forgot to say, the Gini coefficient never gets higher than 0.1’ (100). Magic!
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Fictional utopias can be a powerful tool for critiquing reality and imagining alternatives to it. Cohen and Van Hear seem uninterested in the former: Refugia, they say, ‘is about lifting our heads above the real’ (116). The vignettes nonetheless contains an implicit critique, albeit a selective one fixated on ‘identity politics’ rather than material politics, and notably uncritical of the frictionless dreams of tech ideologists. But the book does not so much rise above the real as blithely refuse to consider it. As a result, Refugia is not ‘a promising new path through the thicket of inertia and convention’ (116) for anyone interested in less dystopian alternatives to our current system. New paths are urgently needed, but as policy analysis Refugia is simply too shallow to be a useful resource. And this is a failure of imagination. Their ‘refugee’ characters are simply puppets for the authors’ fantasies. They have put no creative effort into imagining a plausible history for their transnational polity of 2030, or into working through the consequences of their ideas. This utopia is neither realistic nor imaginative enough.
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References
Achiume, E. Tendayi. 2020. Racial and xenophobic discrimination, emerging digital technologies, and border and immigration enforcement. Thematic report of United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance to the UN General Assembly, 10 Nov 2020. https://antiracismsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/A_75_590_Advance-Unedited-Version.pdf.
Gatrell, Peter. 2013. The Making of the Modern Refugee. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jemisin, N.K. 2015. The Fifth Season. London: Orbit.
Jemisin, N.K. 2016. The Obelisk Gate.London: Orbit.
Jemisin, N.K. 2017. The Stone Sky. London: Orbit.
Lemberg-Pedersen, Martin and Eman Haioty. 2020. “Re-Assembling the Surveillable Refugee Body in the Era of Data-Craving.” Citizenship Studies 24 (5): 607–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2020.1784641.
Madianou, Mirca. 2019. “The Biometric Assemblage: Surveillance, Experimentation, Profit, and the Measuring of Refugee Bodies.” Television & New Media 20 (6): 581–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419857682.
Malkki, Liisa. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
White 2019. Benjamin Thomas White, ‘Refuge and history: a critical reading of a polemic’, Migration and Society: Advances in Research, 2: 107–118. https://doi.org/10.3167/arms.2019.020111.
[1] The authors also discuss ‘sanctuary cities’ here, but they are the odd one out: rather than a scheme for reforming the refugee regime, this is an actually existing global initiative of small-scale, locally grounded, practical efforts to respond to states’ failure to act on their obligations under it.
[2] The book was written before non-Refugians started burning 5G telephone masts for spreading coronavirus, or refusing the vaccine because it would place microchips in our bodies: real-world science fiction more compelling and troubling than anything these authors can invent.
‘Everything destroyed and burnt. Men only remained’ – Serbian refugees, probably in Albania, 1915, by Sampson Tchernoff (Library of Congress)
A few years ago I wrote a post about images of refugees on land, and how they reduce refugees to an anonymous mass: a visual trope I called the overland trudge. This trope is shaped partly by photographic technologies (the constraints and possibilities of the cameras and lenses used to take the image, and the media formats in which they’re reproduced) and partly by artistic and journalistic convention. The photographer turns individual people into nameless and indistinguishable ‘refugees’ by stepping back to bring numbers into the frame, but rarely steps back far enough to allow any significant feature of the landscape to come into view. We may get a sense of what it’s like, arid and dusty or frozen hard, but we rarely get a sense of where it is. One of the recent impracticable schemes to solve the problem of mass displacement proposes “a confederal, transnational polity” named Refugia: this harsh and featureless place is what it really looks like.
There’s no sense, in these images, of landscape as anything other than hard stuff to be grimly trudged across—an unmetaphorically hostile environment. And for many refugees and other people on the move, the landscapes they cross are indeed hostile. Rich states take advantage of this. US policy on its southern border in recent decades has been to choke off access into the country from Mexico, pushing undocumented border-crossers away from crossing-points in populated and well-served areas and ever further out into the harshest landscapes: Jason de León’s work explores the material culture of border crossing in what he calls the land of open graves. The European Union more visibly relies on the Mediterranean Sea to keep undocumented travellers out, refugees among them. But the high visibility of the Mediterranean also draws attention away from the barrier of the Sahara, a formidable obstacle for those travelling from further south.
Excerpt from Bessora & Barroux, ‘Alpha: Abidjan to Gare du Nord’ (2016)
But landscape is more to people on the move than just a prolonged series of obstacles on the journey, a potential open grave. The landscapes of home are often carried in memory, and may shape the experience of landscape in exile: Thaer Ali, an Iraqi Kurd living as a refugee in the UK, explained to photographer John Perivolaris that the trees on the road to Nottingham city centre reminded him of looking up through the branches of trees while going to visit his grandfather’s village as a child, when he would ‘reach up and try to touch the branches’. Features in a landscape of exile can form a sudden connection with the landscape of home, bringing the past—welcome or unwelcome—into the present.
The poetry of John Clare (1793–1864) is one of the most intimate engagements with landscape in the English language, but it is a poetry of loss. The Northamptonshire landscape Clare knew as a boy at the turn of the nineteenth century was enclosed by act of parliament in 1809, the same year in which he wrote his first poem. The fields, woods, and common lands of his poetry were being radically transformed as he wrote about them, a transformation of property law that would displace the variegated local culture of their people, and set their teeming profusion of plant and animal life on the path to the diminished, hollowed-out nature of the commercialized (and later industrialized) agricultural landscape: ‘simplification for alienation’, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing puts it. In different ways, the same displacement has occurred, and is still occurring, around the world.
At nearly 40, Clare was offered the rent of a cottage at Northborough, three miles from his home of Helpston, through the assistance of wellwishers and friends. But the move, which was intended to help stabilize his finances and his family situation, permanently destabilized him—he seems to have experienced it as an intensified version of the lifelong displacement he bears witness to in so much of his poetry.
Here every tree is strange to me
All foreign things where ere I go
—John Clare, ‘The Flitting’ (1833)
At Helpston, every whitethorn bush, stile, or quarry had its intimate associations, in his own memory and in a shared local culture. The woods and fields of Northborough, so close by, were alien to him.
But landscapes of exile can also be a resource for displaced people. At a seminar I hosted in September 2018, geographer Sara Kindon asked us to rethink the place of ‘place’ in refugee integration. ‘Integration’ of refugees is often understood in a narrowly economic sense, perhaps supported by some legal recognition: refugee status and the right to work, most obviously, and in the longer term perhaps citizenship in the host state. But it takes a much thicker set of associations for any of us to feel integrated in a new place. Some of them are social, but others are ecological: a familiarity with the landscape and its more than human inhabitants, for example. I’ve been thinking about this ever since, and have written about it in a chapter that will be coming out later this year on ‘Animals, people, and places in displacement’. But only after that chapter was in press did I read Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s marvellous book The Mushroom at the End of the World, which tells—among so many other things—of how different groups of southeast Asian refugees in the USA draw on their experience of jungle warfare in the 1960s and 70s and longer traditions of forest mobility to participate, in different ways, in the picking and trading of the matsutake mushrooms that grow in symbiosis with the roots of the lodgepole pines that are reclaiming the logged-out Oregon forests. Skills honed in one landscape could be adapted to another, half a world away. “Mushroom picking layers together Laos and Oregon, war and hunting” (p91). It works not just as a livelihood strategy, allowing new Americans to earn a living in a time when the postwar welfare state has long since been dismantled, but also as a way of asserting an American commitment to a particular understanding of ‘freedom’. There’s much more to say about refugees and landscapes, and I have a lot of thinking still to do.
The news from Syria has been nothing but bad for several years now, but things have been particularly desperate in the last few days—since Turkish forces, with a green light from the American president, invaded the region of northern Syria that had been under autonomous Kurdish rule, as Rojava. (You can read an overview of the situation and what is at stake in this Guardian article: What is the situation in north-eastern Syria?)
Although I mainly work on refugee history these days, earlier in my career I was a Syria specialist, and I spent a lot of time researching the history of the area that Turkey has just invaded. The demarcation of the Syrian-Turkish border in the 1920s and 30s was crucial to the constitution of state sovereignty on either side of it. Turkey and Syria were newly established states, though they were quite different: Turkey was ruled by a nationalist government that had successfully fought off multiple invasions, while Syria was only nominally independent under French colonial ‘supervision’. What I was really interested in, though, was how these interconnected processes shaped the political identities of the people living in what became the northern Syrian borderlands. A lot of them were Kurdish, and the border made them a minority in a new Syrian nation-state.
As a historian, I don’t have privileged knowledge about current events, and I’m feeling pretty helpless and hopeless about them. But if it’s helpful for anyone reading this to get some background on how this part of the world came to be divided between Syria and Turkey, and what that meant for Kurds living there, with permission from the publishers I’m making some of the things I’ve written on the subject freely available.
First, here is a PDF of a chapter of my book (2011) on ‘The border and the Kurds’. It explains the impact that the demarcation of the border had on Kurds across the new Syrian nation-state. Right through the 1920s and 30s, Syria’s borders didn’t have much meaningful physical presence on the ground. But increasingly, the border as a line between two state jurisdictions made it a meaningful presence in people’s lives (and in people’s minds) nonetheless. The drawing of Syria’s borders tended to make all Kurds in the country—whether they lived in the borderlands or in Damascus—into one ‘minority’ community.
Second, my article ‘Refugees and the definition of Syria, 1920-1939’ (2017) argues that the arrival and settlement of refugees brought the geographical borders of Syria into much sharper definition, and accelerated the spread of effective state authority across its territory—as well as raising questions about whether Syrian national identity should be defined to include or exclude the incomers. Kurdish refugees from the new Turkish Republic were one of the three main groups of refugees entering Syria in this period, and the places that became Syrian included the areas that Kurds have governed autonomously for the last few years. The Turkish army’s invasion has prompted the Kurdish government to invite the Syrian regime back in.
Finally, an older article in French, ‘Frontières et pouvoir d’Etat: La frontière turco-syrienne dans les années 1920 et 1930’ (2009), written with my colleague and friend Seda Altuğ, goes into more detail on the process of how the border was drawn on the ground, and what role it played in the constitution of state authority on both sides. For Turkey, a national frontier was being created, that needed defending against local populations that were viewed as a threat (especially Kurds and Armenians) as well as against French imperialism. On the Syrian side, where the border was both a Syrian national and French imperial frontier, the situation was more complicated.
Thanks to Emma Rees at Edinburgh University Press for giving me permission to make chapter 4 of my book freely available, and providing the PDF, and to Anna Bayman and the editors of Past & Present for agreeing to make ‘Refugees and the definition of Syria’ freely available for a period. (‘Frontières et pouvoir d’État’ was already free to read.) And thanks to Sadiah Qureshi for her very helpful comments on a draft of this post.
Image: Excerpt from index map for Series K421, 1:500,000 maps of the Levant, produced by the UK War Office, 1942-
Source: Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas at Austin
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about an article of mine that had just come out, and its very long road to publication. At the end of it I blithely wrote that “The next article I publish should be out rather quicker—though the gestation time has been almost as long.”
This was both correct and incorrect. The next article I published did come out much more quickly, but it wasn’t the one I was talking about. ‘Humans and animals in a refugee camp: Baquba, Iraq, 1918-1920’ was submitted to the Journal of Refugee Studies in November 2017, went through peer review and revision that winter, and was published online in May 2018 (and in print this week). But the article I was actually referring to, on the history of humanitarian evacuations, didn’t come out until the end of April 2019. So I was wrong about it being published more quickly, but I was right about the long gestation time: I’d started drafting it, in early April 2013, based on research done over the previous couple of years, and I first gave versions of it as a seminar paper in November 2013 and January 2014.
This isn’t an unusually slow turnaround time for publishing an academic journal article in history. One thing that added to the delay is simply that the journal it came out in has a crowded publication pipeline: by the time I got my final acceptance in early summer 2017, the contents for all of the issues through to the end of 2018 had already been set. But what I want to write about here is peer review, another routine part of the academic publication process.
Peer review often gets a bad press: just google ‘Reviewer 2’ and you’ll see what I mean. (Perhaps you already belong to the public Facebook group ‘Reviewer 2 must be stopped!’, which at time of writing has 19,602 members.) No-one likes a rejection; no-one greets a critical review with glad eye and open heart; and I doubt that many people relish revising an article that they’d hoped was off their desk forever. I certainly didn’t. Between 2013 and 2017 this article was drafted, submitted, rejected, redrafted, submitted to a different journal, reviewed, accepted ‘with revisions’, revised, edited sharply down, and ‘finally’ accepted. That final acceptance made me very happy, not just because it meant the article was going to be published, but also because by then I was—to say the least—ready to see the back of it.
But I’m also absolutely certain that the published version is much better than the version of it that I first submitted. Even in a humanities discipline like history, which tends to presume (/idealize) single-authored work, getting a piece of work to publication is a much more collaborative process than the single name beneath the title implies. Often, we read other people’s work as if they’d simply sat down one morning and dashed off a print-ready piece to a response of “Grt thx will publish!” from the editors of a leading journal—while we bash our heads against multiple drafts, and nervously await reviewer 2’s stiletto. But any piece of work that’s been published in a reputable journal should have gone through a peer review process, and been improved by it. Plenty of good or excellent published work has been rejected at some point along the way. So this post tries to demystify the process, and show how much effort by other people is being alluded to when a footnote thanks “two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful critical comments”. It’s aimed especially at people who are writing their doctoral dissertations and getting feedback on draft work. As supervisors, I’m not sure how well we explain the fact that our own work gets the red-ink treatment from peer reviewers all the time, and it’s not simply a hazing ritual: it makes our work better. There are plenty of blog posts out there discussing what happens when peer review goes wrong, as it often does. This one is about what happens when it goes right.
The first draft
Approximate length of main text : length of footnotes ratio (first draft)
In its first draft, my article told a story: how French forces, as they withdrew from Cilicia in what is now Turkey in November-December 1921, grudgingly evacuated many thousands of Armenian refugees. I’d done tons of archival research, and the story spread across the eastern Mediterranean and beyond, so writing the article took a while. I also needed to keep in mind three overlapping but distinct audiences: historians of the Middle East; historians of refugees and displacement; and historians of humanitarian action. This meant that the text grew footnotes the way a ship’s hull grows barnacles and seaweed the longer it spends in the water: in some cases, bibliographical mini-essays summarizing the literature on, say, the history of Cilicia up to the first world war for the benefit of readers with no prior knowledge of the region, or the history of first world war–era population displacements across Eurasia for historians of the Middle East. (The footnotes were also for my benefit, of course, like a pair of stabilizer wheels on an unconfident child’s bike.) Still, I was pretty happy with it, and friends and colleagues working in several different areas read the draft and offered broadly positive feedback and helpful suggestions. So eventually I felt I’d told the story well enough, and in the early spring of 2016 I sent it off. I thought I might as well try for a biggie: the American Historical Review, perhaps the leading journal in the discipline. I mean—it was an interesting story, right?
Therejection (well: revise and resubmit)
As the most prominent English-language journal in the discipline, the AHR has a larger full-time editorial staff than most. This means they have a somewhat different review process than most other journals I’ve encountered (in history, area studies, and refugee studies). Before the editor sends submissions out for peer review, they’re read by a member of the editorial staff, who writes a report recommending whether they should be sent out or not. Given the volume of submissions, this reduces the burden on (unpaid) peer reviewers, who don’t have to spend time reading and commenting on articles that clearly aren’t suitable, or aren’t good enough. The articles that are sent to peer review therefore get through it more quickly, while people whose submissions are not sent for review find out promptly rather than having to wait months for a rejection.
I was in the second group. No more than a couple of weeks after my submission was acknowledged, an email from the AHR editor arrived, with two attachments. One was a letter informing me, quite kindly, that my article would not be sent to peer review. The other was the reader’s report explaining why not. (With the permission of the editor and the anonymous reader, you can download it here [PDF].)
The letter was a ‘revise and resubmit’ rather than an outright rejection: my article wouldn’t be sent out for peer review at this stage, but a revised version would be considered. The editor suggested what the main revisions should be, and said that “the fix required is rather simple… and can probably be done simply by moving a few paragraphs around”. The report, which ran to nearly a thousand words, critically and incisively summarized my article, outlining why it wasn’t ready for peer review at the AHR yet. Publishable in a specialist journal, maybe, but “the AHR’s readership expects the kind of conceptual or analytical innovation that can transfer across fields of historical inquiry”.
Specialist readers might be intrigued in the regional history or the humanitarian history, but the vast majority of the AHR’s distinctive comprehensive readership spanning all fields of historical inquiry would most likely have felt alienated and deterred from reading very far into the piece.
If the letter was the good cop, the report was the bad cop.
A ‘revise and resubmit’ is always discouraging, and on reflection I was more discouraged by this one than I should have been. But I can understand why. When this email arrived, I hadn’t published anything other than book reviews since my own book came out four years earlier: a worrying gap. A few months earlier I’d submitted another hefty article to a different big-name journal, which would eventually publish it—but I didn’t know that yet, as I was still waiting for their reviewers’ response. These were also my first submissions to general history journals rather than more specialist Middle East studies journals. So I was, frankly, doubting my ability to write publishable work in history. (I’m now in a history department, not a Middle East studies department: there were institutional as well as intellectual reasons why I wanted to publish in non-specialist journals.) It was also the back end of a busy spring semester, and I was feeling as fraught and teary as usual at that stage of the teaching year. So I set the whole thing aside until the Easter break, by which time a positive response for the other article had allayed my catastrophizing. But it had also requested some minor revisions, which—since they would definitely lead to a publication—took priority as the spring turned to summer.
The revised draft
It wasn’t until later that summer that I returned to the article about humanitarian evacuations, and read through the AHR reader’s report again. Bad cop? More like correct cop. The gist of it was that this draft told the story of the Cilician evacuation at length, but I’d only really explained why I was telling the story at the end, and hadn’t offered nearly enough to convince a non-specialist audience of historians why this story should matter to them. Rereading the draft, I could see how right they were. I’d stayed too close to the archival material, giving a forensic but descriptive reconstruction of the historical events without analyzing them or making an argument for their larger significance. The report challenged me to do better:
[C]an the author front-load in the submission a decisive argument that bespeaks an original and innovative contribution to the historiography on humanitarianism, beyond simply the addition of the factor of evacuations earlier than expected? […C]an the author draw out more from the subject and the case study?
The first draft had said I wanted to use this story to establish humanitarian evacuations as an object of historical enquiry. Great. But it didn’t say why, or do much more than present an early example. Reframing it for a revised draft meant introducing the policy and practice of humanitarian evacuations, sketching out their history, and reviewing the available scholarly literature—limited, and mostly in the social sciences—to say why historians should study humanitarian evacuations. It meant stating more clearly the significance of humanitarian evacuations. And it meant more rigorously using ‘my’ case study to set out a comparative framework for understanding other evacuations, or failures to evacuate.
Approximate main text : footnotes ratio (second draft)
All of this took a while. Friends helped, providing suggestions and references: the footnotes proliferated still further. But the AHR report had given me a clear idea of what needed to be done, and once I’d worked out how to do it I made steady progress. By late 2016 I had a revised draft, and a friend who works for Médecins sans frontières had read it and confirmed that it did a better job than the first of explaining the significance of the topic and providing directions for future research. I sent it off—but not to the AHR. This was partly out of insecurity: I still wasn’t sure I’d done enough to make the article relevant to a discipline-wide audience of historians. But having revised the article, and ’embedded’ it in a wider literature on humanitarian evacuations (and evacuees) in a number of different disciplines, I was pretty sure that I’d made the story relevant to historians and other researchers who are interested in humanitarianism. So I submitted it to Humanity, a newish journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of human rights, humanitarianism, and development. Because that other article of mine was by now in press with a mainstream history journal, I no longer minded going for a more specialist journal for this one.
Then the wait began, again.
‘Accepted with revisions’
It wasn’t too long. In January 2017 I got an email from the editor with good news: Humanity would like to publish the article—subject to some revisions. One of the peer reviewers had been on the fence, while the other had been enthusiastic but also pointed out that there was some existing literature that I ought to have cited. The editorial collective had liked it. So the editor suggested particular areas for revision based on what the reviewers had said.
This was all ‘good practice’ in peer review. If reviewers’ reports are contradictory, or suggest varying degrees of revision, the author of an article should be able to get a steer from the editor as to which points they should prioritize in revising the article. In this case, I didn’t need to ask: the editor made it clear in his email how I should approach the revisions. And, while being asked to go and revise the article again was a bit discouraging—we do get sick of things we’ve been working on forever!—this was quite different. I knew the article would be published if I made the revisions. I also basically agreed with all of the reviewers’ suggestions.
What do I mean by that? The editor suggested “reframing the intro… so that it is less around when the origins [of humanitarian evacuation] were and more around what the political logics were”: this was pushing me a bit further in the direction I’d already been travelling. I’d reframed the article for the revised draft, but I’d still spent more time than I needed to discussing when things happened and not enough saying why they happened then. The lukewarm reviewer pointed out that it wasn’t good enough to say that my sources didn’t allow me to reconstruct refugees’ own experiences, and they were right. This was a key methodological problem that I’d tried to grapple with (it’s something historians of refugees run into frequently). I couldn’t fix it—at least, not without extensive further research in several different countries requiring languages that I don’t speak—but the comment pushed me to make a more explicit argument about what the absence of ‘refugee voices’ in the French archives tells us. The more enthusiastic reviewer had several helpful suggestions for readings (more footnotes!), including one book that had, shamingly, been lying unread on my table throughout the research and writing of the article, and picked out several points where I needed to provide more information about certain people and organizations or more support for a point of argument. So this revision was much quicker than the more comprehensive rethink and reframing I’d had to do between the first and second draft. It still took a few months, because I had an exceptionally busy spring and summer in 2017. But in early June I sent off the revised version, along with a document explaining how I’d incorporated the reviewers’ suggestions—or why I’d decided not to.
Main text : footnotes ratio, third draft
The editor was happy with the revisions. There was just one problem: the article was now a monster, with the main text coming in at just under 10,000 words but the footnotes taking the total closer to 18,000. (Most journals ask for articles in the range of 7–10,000 words, notes included.) Could I please get it down to a more publishable length—say, 14,000 words?
To my own surprise, I could, and pretty quickly: this savage-sounding edit—over a fifth of the total length—took no more than a morning. The successive rounds of comments and revisions had helped me clarify the argument, so I could now see which details were essential and which were interesting (to me) but unnecessary. The immense scaffolding of footnotes had been keeping hold, at each stage, of yet more information that might come in handy for a revision: this could all go. It had also introduced several sets of readings to different potential audiences, but now I knew which audience the article would be read by and could trim accordingly. And that was the version that got the ‘final acceptance’ email, and is now published. It’s still pretty long, but it’s no longer a monster. So now other people can read it, decide what they find useful about it, and explain in their own work what I got wrong.
*
This, believe it or not, is a somewhat condensed summary of the peer review process. I haven’t done justice to the contribution of five friends who read drafts of the article and sent extensive comments; I haven’t explained how helpful the ‘reverse outline‘ technique was when I revised the draft. But I hope it shows how two rounds of peer review, one unsuccessful and one successful, helped to make a better article—and gives an idea of just how much work other people put into that. (The comments I got from friends, colleagues, and reviewers probably total about the length of the article’s main text.) I’m very grateful to them.
Quotes from correspondence with the editors and from readers’ reports are given with permission: thanks to the current editors of the AHR and Humanity for helping to arrange this.
For various reasons—the usual, too much to do, too little time—I haven’t been very active on this blog recently. But things have been quite lively elsewhere. Earlier in the summer my article on ‘Humans and animals in a refugee camp: Baquba, Iraq, 1918-20’ came out in Journal of Refugee Studies (online advance access: the print edition is still forthcoming). If you’re at an institution that subscribes, you can find it by clicking this link; otherwise, by all means email me for a PDF.
A few weeks later, Forced Migration Review published a mini-dossier that I coordinated, made up of seven short articles on the same subject—humans and animals in refugee camps—but with a more contemporary focus. FMR is aimed at policymakers and practitioners rather than academics, and the mini-dossier was an output of the Wellcome Trust seed award project I’ve been running over the past year. The articles are:
an introduction by me, which also sets out some key themes for future research on the subject
a piece on the role of livestock in refugee–host community relations by Charles Hoots, a vet who ran field operations at a refugee camp in South Sudan for Vets Without Borders in 2013-14
a piece on working equids in refugee camps by Patrick Pollock, an academic veterinary surgeon who works with people in the global south who rely on working horses, donkeys and mules for their livelihoods
‘Sheltering animals in refugee camps’, a look at how the architecture of shelter needs to accommodate animals as well as humans, by Lara Alshawawreh, whose research is on the architecture of emergency
a piece on understanding the different contexts that create risk in human–animal interactions in camps, by Sara Owczarczak-Garstecka, who works with vets, engineers, and statisticians (her own research focuses on dog bites)
‘Animal and human health in the Sahrawi refugee camps’, a look at the ways in which animal and human health intersect, by Giorgia Angeloni (who works with Vets Without Borders) and Jennifer Carr (who is researching the history of medical humanitarianism in refugee camps)
and finally, a piece by Scottish wildlife artist Derek Robertson about the creative work he has done on the connections between bird migrations and human forced migrations across the Mediterranean basin and all the way to Scotland
Forced Migration Review is entirely open access. You can download the entire issue in which the mini-dossier appears here, where there are also links to the individual articles and to a standalone PDF of the mini-dossier, as well as audio versions. The issue is now also available in Spanish and in Arabic, if you prefer, though these don’t have audio versions.
I also wrote a blog post for Refugee History that summarizes my own historical research on the camp at Baquba and connects it to the place of animals in camps today. You can find that here.
There will be some other updates shortly, I hope, about writing on related and unrelated topics. But for now, the start of term is about to hit…
I have a new post up on RefugeeHistory.org, about the past, present, and future of Villawood immigration detention centre in Sydney, Australia. You can read it by clicking this link (or the image).
Before I visited Villawood, I’d already blogged about it on here (link), as one of a series of posts about sites of confinement and containment in modern Australian history—others included Maribyrnong immigration detention centre in Melbourne and the old quarantine stations at Point Nepean, also near Melbourne, and North Head in Sydney.
Gilmorehill House during the construction of the University of Glasgow’s Main Building in the 1860s. University of Glasgow archives and special collections, PHU1/104/1
This post has been updated (23 March 2018)—see below.
The University of Glasgow, where I work, has a beautiful campus. It’s on Gilmorehill, perched above a bend in the river Kelvin in the west end of the city—a commanding position that features heavily in the university’s advertising. But the university only moved here in the 1860s and 70s, over four hundred years after its foundation in 1451. The shift was part of the general westward migration of wealth, power and influence in Glasgow in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which still very visibly marks the city. Before that, the university’s buildings had been set around College Green next to the High Street, near the cathedral: ‘some of the most remarkable C17 architecture in Scotland’, the Pevsner architectural guide to Glasgow says, ‘their loss was a tragedy’ (p. 335). But the university needed to sell that large site, to a subsidiary of the North British Railway Company, to pay for the move.
Most of the land the university now occupies on Gilmorehill was purchased as a single estate. It had been constituted in 1800-1803 by one Robert Bogle, who also had a substantial house built for himself here. The university bought the site in 1863 and building work began in April 1867 with the levelling of the hilltop, but the house itself was retained during construction as offices for the architects and contractors. The photograph above shows the house in the late 1860s, with the west quadrangle of the present-day main building going up around it: only after the official completion of the move was the house demolished.
The university’s archives and special collections tweeted the picture a week or two ago. I saw the picture when someone else I follow on Twitter, the Glaswegian musician (and Edinburgh PhD researcher) Diljeet Bhachu, asked what had happened to the house—then swiftly followed that up with a second tweet saying ‘Actually, never mind. A quick google says it was built by a slave owner.’ This was news to me: I’d never thought to find out what was on the hilltop before the university moved up here. But a little research soon introduced me to Robert Bogle of Gilmorehill and many other members of his family. It also brought me straight into contact with Glasgow’s history of slave-ownership, and with real-world examples of the euphemisms that cover it up—reminding me of the words of Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, and Keith McClelland:
Slave-ownership is virtually invisible in British history. It has been elided by strategies of euphemism and evasion originally adopted by the slave-owners themselves and subsequently reproduced widely in British culture.
—Hall et al., Legacies of British Slave-Ownership:
Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2014), p. 1
The first of these was on the university’s own website, where the ‘University of Glasgow Story’, a database of historical information about people in the institution’s past, has a page about the vanished building. This notes that it was ‘built by the West Indies merchant Robert Bogle Junior’.
‘West Indies merchant’: this is one of the very examples that Hall and her colleagues give on the first page of their book, when they show how modern-day resources like the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, or the University of Glasgow Story, “continue to reflect (consciously or otherwise) the strategies of the slave-owners of the early nineteenth century, who evaded the very term ‘slave-owner’.” The database that they themselves produced, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership, is less coy: as well as being a ‘merchant’, in 1813 Robert Bogle of Gilmorehill inherited from his brother a quarter of Dunkley’s Dry River Estate in Jamaica, which had been producing sugar and rum since at least the 1780s. Other members of the family owned the rest.
Robert Bogle died in 1821, before the British empire finally abolished slavery, but when it did, in the 1830s, two hundred and eighty-six people were enslaved on the estate. Members and in-laws of the extended Bogle family, including Robert Bogle’s son Archibald, shared £6230 5s 8d in compensation from the British government for the ‘property’ they had lost: in the simplest terms of purchasing power parity that would come to well over half a million pounds at 2016 prices, though by other methods of calculating worth it’s a much more significant sum.* (I used the site MeasuringWorth.com for this.)
There are many other Glasgow Bogles in the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership database, and a couple in the ODNB. It’s a bit hard to trace the connections between them, not least because across several generations and several branches of the family the names George, Robert, and Archibald recur frequently. The LBSO database thinks Robert Bogle of Gilmorehill (?1757–1821) was the son of Archibald Bogle and Janet Cathcart. If that’s the case then he must have had a cousin of the same name, a similar age, and a near identical occupation: the ODNB entry for the George Bogle (1700–1784), ‘merchant’, who was four times Rector of the University of Glasgow, notes that his inheritor was his son Robert Bogle. It’s possible that these late C18th/early C19th Robert Bogles are in fact one and the same, but it’s just as likely that they shared a name—after all, George Bogle 1700-84 was the son of another Robert, and the father of another George.
In any case, two things are clear. First, many of the Glasgow Bogles profited from enslavement, and from the ‘compensation’ paid to slave owners after 1833. Second, modern-day reference works including the University of Glasgow Story and the (immensely larger and more authoritative) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography do a very good job of hiding the fact. The former has Robert Bogle, builder of Gilmorehill House, as an innocent-sounding ‘West Indies merchant’. The latter’s entry on George Bogle (1700-84) is packed with the sorts of euphemism that Catherine Hall and her colleagues identify: ‘Bogle’s mercantile career from the later 1720s was focused on the colonial trades of sugar and tobacco’; ‘His son Robert Bogle inherited the family estates, and the dynasty continued in the mercantile world.’
This is a direct example of the way wealth derived from enslavement shaped the city of Glasgow as we live in it today. As an example of the way enslavement shaped the University of Glasgow, it’s only indirect: this is about how the estate the university bought was constituted, not about the sources of the university’s own wealth. It would be interesting to know how the university profited directly from enslavement, as it surely did. But if the institution’s self-history, the ‘University Story’, euphemizes and disguises the role of enslavement in making the city, I doubt it’s ready to take a hard look at its own past.
*
UPDATE: A colleague informs me that I spoke too soon: the university is already investigating its connections with slavery, following a decision made by its senior management group (SMG) in July 2016. The following information—a preliminary acknowledgement—has now been prepared for the University Story; below that is the SMG’s statement.
Glasgow was one of Britain’s leading centres of trade with the Chesapeake and West Indian colonies, meaning that large amounts of slave-produced commodities such as tobacco, sugar, cotton and rum came into the city. First the ‘Tobacco Lords’ and then the ‘West India merchants’ were wealthy and powerful elites in and around Glasgow. While not all owned enslaved people and plantations, some did, and in both cases much of their wealth derived from slave labour.
The Senior Management Group (SMG) of the University of Glasgow issued a statement in July 2016 acknowledging that although the University was active in the movement to abolish the slave trade and slavery, the University also received gifts and bequests from persons who may have benefited from the proceeds of slavery. On the authorisation of SMG a research team is evaluating the nature and extent of the University’s connections with people who profited from slavery. At the same time, a steering committee is preparing a report for SMG so that it can adopt a series of measures designed to begin the process of addressing and redressing this history. As a first step, in 2017 the University of Glasgow became the first British University to join the international consortium of Universities Studying Slavery.
And here’s that statement on slavery, approved by the Senior Management Group on 11 July 2016:
The University of Glasgow acknowledges that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it received some gifts and bequests from persons who may have benefitted from the proceeds of slavery. Income from such gifts and bequests has been used in supporting academic activity undertaken by the students and staff of the University.
The University notes that, during the era of slavery, many of its staff adopted a clear anti-slavery position. For example, the Principal and Clerk of Senate, on behalf of the Senate of the University, petitioned the House of Commons in 1788, and again in 1792, against slave holding and slave trading; in 1791, the University honoured William Wilberforce with the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws in recognition of his anti-slavery work; Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson and John Millar all wrote against slavery in their publications; and James McCune Smith, an emancipated slave, graduated in medicine from the University of Glasgow in 1837, and, in so doing, became the first African-American in the world to graduate in medicine. Smith came to study at the University of Glasgow for this degree as he was barred from doing so in the United States because of his colour.
The Senior Management Group (SMG) of the University of Glasgow has instructed that research be undertaken and a report prepared on the University’s connections with those persons who may have benefitted from the proceeds of slavery. When it receives this report, the SMG will consider the most appropriate way of acknowledging those connections.
That initial research project is being carried out in the current academic year: see this report from last September in The Scotsman for more information. I look forward to seeing the results of the research—and the actions the university takes in response.
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*To be in the same sort of relationship to the average wage today as someone earning a wage of £6230 5s 8d in 1835, you would need to be earning over £5m a year. Slaves, of course, were not paid a wage.
![A line of seven young children squat down in sand. They are not looking at the camera, but at letters moulded into the sand in front of them: NAŠA ŠKOLA [our school]](https://singularthings.files.wordpress.com/2023/01/s-0800-0008-0010-00036.jpg)
Singular Things 