Are refugee ‘return’ and ‘repatriation’ the same thing? This article investigates the mid-century emergence of these two key concepts in the context of the entangled histories of post-1945 displacement and resettlement in Palestine/Israel, which has long had the dubious distinction of serving as a central site of international experimentation vis-à-vis modern questions surrounding mass expulsion and the possibilities of return. Despite the deeply interwoven nature of Palestinian and Jewish displacement, scholars have generally accepted these histories as distinct and segregated national memories. Such accounts actively ignore a crucial set of actors in the making of these forced migrations and their aftermaths: the ‘international community’, made up mainly of the victorious Allied powers, who constructed the framework within which such nationally bounded interpretations could be perpetuated and sustained. This article therefore aims to bring the international dimension to the forefront and to combine it with the history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) to examine how the concepts of ‘return’ and ‘repatriation’ evolved – and diverged – in the aftermath of the Second World War, in the context of an emerging modern international refugee regime designed primarily to serve superpower interests.

Forced displacement brings with it the loss of property, belonging, and identity. Objects encode the nexus between citizenship, property, and sense of belonging/emotional attachment. The article explores the connection between citizenship and property and thereby highlights the agency of victims and their refugee’s polis. This case-study focuses on Jewish Austrian citizens who fled from Austria to Shanghai during the Nazi occupation era, expelled by the Nuremberg racial laws. During this racial persecution, they lost their citizenship and subsequently all their assets, with most of their belongings stored at the port of Trieste. Surprisingly, even after the end of the Second World War and Nazi occupation, it proved very difficult for Jews to regain their citizenship and property, for reasons highlighted in this article. The post-war nation-state could not deliver justice to actors whose economic, social, and cultural lives had been shaped through forced migration. Following scandals like the ‘Woman in Gold’ dispute concerning the return of a painting by Klimt in 2006, legal transformation in the fields of monetary compensation and citizenship laws was only brought about by resolutely transnational political-legal activism.

This article sheds light on the political thought of prominent authors belonging to Baltic German aristocratic families, examining their responses to the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of the Third Reich. Focusing on the writings of authors such as the international lawyer Mikhail von Taube and the philosopher Hermann Keyserling, it examines the peculiar combination of uprootedness and cosmopolitanism which characterized the political thought of these unmoored elites. Lacking a definite attachment to specific post-imperial successor states, these authors demonstrate a recursive loyalty to their own family history. An elite group among the diverse sets of people and nationalities fleeing the Russian empire as it descended into revolution and civil war between 1917 and 1922, including Jews, people from the Caucasus, Poles, and many other nationalities, the Baltic German nobility stood out as representatives of an ethnic and religious minority whose ancestors had settled on the Baltic littoral long before the Russian empire or other states in the region had emerged. The article contributes to a new approach to the intellectual history of refugees from a global perspective, which emphasizes the importance of language, faith, nationality, and social class as factors shaping ideas about political attachment among displaced intellectuals.

The ubiquity of social media platforms allows individuals to easily share and curate their personal lives with friends, family, and the world. The selective nature of sharing one’s personal life may reinforce the memories and details of the shared experiences while simultaneously inducing the forgetting of related, unshared memories/experiences. This is a well-established psychological phenomenon known as retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF, Anderson et al.). To examine this phenomenon in the context of social media, two experiments were conducted using an adapted version of the RIF paradigm in which participants either shared experimenter-contrived (Study 1) or personal photographs (Study 2) on social media platforms. Study 1 revealed that participants had more accurate recall of the details surrounding the shared photographs as well as enhanced recognition of the shared photographs. Study 2 revealed that participants had more consistent recall of event details captured in the shared photographs than details captured or uncaptured in the unshared photographs. These results suggest that selectively sharing photographs on social media may specifically enhance the recollection of event details associated with the shared photographs. The novel and ecologically embedded methods provide fodder for future research to better understand the important role of social media in shaping how individuals remember their personal experiences.

The British Raj formally ended on 15 August 1947. In the years following the bifurcation of British India into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, between 11 and 18 million people migrated to escape sectarian pogroms at the hands of the majority population. By 1950, many South Asian – specifically Bengali – refugees were radically critiquing decolonization. Theorizing from their experiences of proletarianization, East Bengali refugees argued that decolonization had been incomplete. The postcolonial Indian state was a neocolonial state allied to Western imperialism. Refugees imagined themselves as part of a worldwide struggle between Anglo-American imperialism and Sino-Soviet-led socialist anti-imperialism. Refugees assembled in hundreds and thousands across the Indian state of West Bengal to overthrow regimes of big private property. They condemned the operations of money economy. They aimed to overcome capitalism. Inspired by Chinese communists, they built a vast confederal democracy uniting refugee camps and colonies – a ‘refugee polis’. This article offers a socially-contextualized intellectual history of this epic transformation, which delegitimized the postcolonial Indian state and dramatically drew the country, through struggles waged by refugees, into the tumult of the Cold War. The article prompts us to visualize the subaltern origins of the Cold War in India.

In historical global refugee studies, the voices of migrants and their agency have become of growing interest. As recent research shows, migration is a complex process that is not simply obstructed by states but rather negotiated between different actors. Within these processes, migrants play a vital and active role as so-called ‘agents of experience’. This article analyses how specific migration processes have been negotiated by exploring the agency of German-speaking refugees from the Holocaust in wartime Australia with a particular focus on the negotiation of citizenship legislation. Relying on social cognitive theory, it focuses on actions taken at an institutional level of refugee agency. This allows for the understanding of how refugees have organized themselves and reveals what they did at an institutional level to become a point of reference for the Australian government and to influence its decision to introduce the new legal term of ‘refugee alien’.

In the early modern period, the waters of East and Southeast Asia saw a bustling maritime trade. To conduct this trade, ships needed competent sailors to safely travel between ports. Chinese sources name one person as particularly important: the huozhang 火長. The sources tell us that the huozhang were charged to use the compass and, employing sailing manuals, to guide ships in the correct direction. In this role, they had to work closely with other sailors, such as duogong 舵工 (steersmen). This article reconstructs the role and function of the navigating personnel on Chinese ships, as well as the tools they used to determine course in the period between the fifteenth and eighteenth century.

This article demonstrates that the Central Stau language (Horpa < Gyalrongic < Sino-Tibetan/Trans-Himalayan) possesses a binary egophoricity contrast in its copular system in affirmative clauses not described and analysed in detail before. It examines the functions of the egophoric copula ŋu and its non-egophoric counterpart ŋə. Of these, the former signals the relevant speech act participant’s personal involvement, epistemic authority or a portrayed stance of a close bond in the proposition. Despite the differences in their functions and differing prototypical domains of use, reflecting patterns of “canonical” egophoricity, the choice between the copulas shows great flexibility and frequently reflects how the speakers wish to encode their epistemic stance. In brief, situation-dependent discourse pragmatics, rather than grammatical person encoded by the copular subject, determines copular use in Stau. The article thus concurs with other recent research on egophoricity that highlights the versatility of this epistemic category.

Drawing on a 1936 ethnographic enquiry and specialised literature, including magazines on domestic appliances and rural life, this article examines how wood, coal, bottled gas, and electricity coexisted – rather than replaced one another – in rural French households from the 1860s to the 1950s. New fuels and kitchen technologies were layered onto existing practices, which required farm women to juggle multiple energy sources and cooking tools across seasons. Cast-iron stoves and portable cookers, acquired according to economic (wealth, occupation), environmental (deforestation, proximity to mines), and geographic (latitude, altitude) constraints, reduced the need for constant fire monitoring and reshaped domestic labour. They facilitated more complex cooking and freed up time – only for it to be consumed by multitasking across expanded household and agricultural duties. The study challenges linear narratives of technological progress, foregrounds addition over substitution, and asks who truly benefited from these innovations – and at what cost.

This article investigates the writings of three German-Jewish intellectuals: Kurt Grossmann (1897–1972), Hannah Arendt (1906–75), and Günther Anders (1902–92). It argues that all three thinkers dealt, in their lives as well as their writing, with the construction of a common refugee polis. Yet this engagement was limited by a political-existential predicament that, through their attempts to reclaim their agency, turned their historical and philosophical works into a renegotiation of their own biographies. The article focuses on key chapters in Arendt’s The origins of totalitarianism, in conjunction with her essay We refugees; on Grossmann’s books The Jewish refugee (co-authored with Arieh Tartakower) and Emigration: the history of the Hitler-refugees 1933–1945; and on Anders’s essay ‘The emigrant’. As victims of National Socialism who fled from Nazi Germany to the US, these authors represent a distinctive view of the transition from the Second World War to the era of the Cold War. Reclaiming agency served as a way to resist subjugation by Nazi race ideology, yet it also circumscribed their belief in the radical potential of the political refugee, resulting in Arendt’s focus on totalitarianism, Grossmann’s limiting the refugee polis to Jewish refugee organizations, and Anders’s inward existential gaze.

Greenstone is commonly used to produce culturally significant items across Mesoamerica, including axes, earspools, figurines, and beads. This research characterizes the mineralogy of greenstone materials recovered from sites in the Jovel Valley, Chiapas, Mexico, to document the range of green minerals utilized by the inhabitants. Our analysis of the objects suggests that the Late Classic and Early Postclassic Maya of the Jovel Valley had access to a variety of greenstone minerals, including serpentinites, green micas, grossular, and jadeite. X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry characterization of reference materials suggests procurement of greenstone resources from the well-documented sources of the Motagua–Polochic Fault Zone, and also potentially from sources in the Chalchihuitán–Chenalhó area of Chiapas, Mexico. The Jovel Valley had access to materials over long distances through historically documented trade routes that allowed the movement of greenstone materials west from the Motagua River Valley into highland Chiapas or south from the Chalchihuitán–Chenalhó area.

This article studies two refugee political communities, the Indian National Army (INA) and Faridabad, during the 1940s. It follows two Indian women who supported the refugees: the captain of the INA’s women’s regiment, Lakshmi Sahgal (née Swaminadhan, 1914–2012), and the socialist freedom fighter Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903–88). Indian and Chinese anti-colonialism and working-class protests in Malaya inspired the INA’s war against British rule in India and Southeast Asia. This article conceptualizes the INA as a refugee polis, comprising Indians displaced by Japanese and British imperialism. Uprooted by the Partition of India, the refugees in Faridabad brought practices of state evasion from the Indo/Pak-Afghan borderlands. Kamaladevi and the Indian Cooperative Union helped organize them into a refugee polis. Thus, the INA and Faridabad, shaped by imperial crises and decolonization, emerged as two refugee poleis. They embodied political alternatives to the nation-state as an outcome of decolonization. The refugees advocated direct democracy, egalitarian redistribution of land, and co-operative economic management. The postcolonial Indian state saw this as a challenge. It transformed refugees into workers, whose labour would generate profits for the state. Although the refugees protested through unionization, strikes, and civil disobedience, ultimately, the Nehruvian state brutally suppressed these refugee poleis.

This paper explores the crisis of 596 which interrupted Augustine of Canterbury's mission to the Anglo-Saxons, necessitating his return to Rome. Bede's interpretation of this as a moment of psychological failure is discounted. Political changes in Merovingian Gaul associated with the death of Childebert are reconsidered. A new economic explanation is advanced based on the wording of Gregory the Great's letter of encouragement to Augustine and his fellow missionaries, consideration of the management of the papal estates in Gaul and the behaviour of Virgilius, metropolitan of Arles.

When the British East India Company (EIC) conquered the West Himalaya region in the 1810s, it faced a critical challenge commonly encountered by colonial empires: determining the extent of intervention in intracommunity criminal matters among colonized subjects. This article examines the archived correspondence of colonial officials regarding this challenge and scrutinizes the various arguments made for and against intervention. It shows that the alterity of the subject population was strategically employed by both sides of the debate, who simultaneously promoted contradictory agendas: for those advocating intervention, alterity rendered involvement in criminal matters necessary and just, whereas those averse to intervention employed the very same notion to justify the opposite stance. This dual usage is explained by exposing the contemporary ideas about criminal justice that underlay each of these positions: that criminal law should represent the general will of society, and that it must be executed by a centralized power so as to maintain public order. While these two tenets are commonly perceived as supporting one another, the analysis reveals their decoupling in colonial settings. The debates of EIC officials thus demonstrate how the colonial setting distorts ideas foundational to modern criminal law systems, casting doubt over whether they were ever truly in harmony to begin with.

On 22 January 2025, an international conference titled “Patrimoine en péril?” was held at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva. It was organized by the UNESCO Chair in the International Law of the Protection of Cultural Heritage (University of Geneva), the Museum of Art and History (MAH), and the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage (ALIPH) Foundation. This event was part of the eponymous exhibition at MAH,1 commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of the entry into force of the Swiss Cultural Property Transfer Act. The conference explored these two themes, bringing together international experts from academia, law, and heritage conservation and management, reflecting a cross-disciplinary perspective on the protection of cultural property in times of crisis. In his opening remarks, Marc-Olivier Wahler (Director of the MAH) highlighted the evolving role of museums in contemporary society. The conference was split into five sessions, each addressing various critical issues related to cultural property, and were moderated by Béatrice Blandin (MAH), Antoinette Maget Dominicé (University of Geneva), and Marc-André Renold (University of Geneva).

Early researchers of Yezidis, a small religious minority of the Middle East, often noted with dismay that Yezidis did not say or know prayers. This observation is partially supported by modern-day research, as knowledge of orally transmitted religious texts and their performance is mostly limited to people recognized as religious experts. However, there exists a special sub-genre of prayers which are known and recited by “ordinary” Yezidis. Although they are referred to as “prayers” (dua), these texts do not constitute part of formal religious performances during ceremonial occasions. They could better be described as verbal charms or incantations aimed at healing sickness or warding off evil. This article gives a translation of four previously unrecorded such “prayers”, describes their role in oral tradition, and finally shows how they are now being transformed from performed (and practical) oral religion to written heritage by the younger generation.