The refugee political in the age of imperial crisis, decolonization, and cold war, 1930s–1950s

The three decades spanning the 1930s, '40s, and '50s witnessed the birth of the modern global state system, characterized by a protracted and tortuous transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states. The demise of Nazi, British, and Japanese empires emancipated millions of people across the world. However, as old empires dissolved, new post-imperial states continued older colonial-origin forms of ethno-religious discrimination and ruling-class dominance, or invented novel hierarchies. Hence, this epoch was marked by catastrophic outbursts of racial violence, sectarian war, and genocide. If majoritarian nation-states were the privileged offspring of this transformation, then refugees were the unwanted issue. The national citizen and the refugee were co-created. Against their forced displacement and subalternization, refugees re-politicized their selves. We define this as ‘the refugee political’: refugees constructing themselves as political beings and building wide-ranging alliances – with churches, politicians, and entrepreneurs; with peasants, industrial workers, and feminists. They became ‘subaltern internationalists’, linking the Dachen Islands to the United States, and maritime Southeast Asia to India; connecting central European Jews to Australian women, or impoverished Indians to Soviet and Chinese communists. They created new forms of ‘refugee polis’ – political communities which were simultaneously local and daringly transnational.