The research behind this book began as an investigation into why the UNHCR varied in the success of its efforts to ensure that economically and politically similar postcommunist states adopt nondiscriminatory refugee policies informed by the standards of the Geneva Convention. It quickly became evident to me that it would be impossible to account for variation in international influences on postcommunist refugee policies without first understanding the domestic political dynamics behind the formation of these policies. At the end, the book proposed a theory of postcommunist refugee policy that integrated domestic and international factors and situated the postcommunist refugee problem in the larger context of postcommunist transition.

Scholars of refugee policies have called for situating studies of refugees in the theories of areas and/or social science studies, rather than highlight distinctiveness. This book is the first account of postcommunist refugee policies that treats these policies as an integral element of the larger processes of transition from communism and interprets refugee policy responses through the prism of the larger politics of transition, specifically the process of state and nation building.