Seminar
Refugees, History, Human Rights
State Library of Victoria
Melbourne, 19-20 August 2010
This seminar brings together scholars from a number of disciplines to reflect upon some of the questions that are not normally included in the debates about refugees and asylum.
How do we conceive of the refugee in the first place? The international regime for refugee protection under the United Nations (as prescribed in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees) gives a definition that is binding on signatory states and is used in the legal process of determining who is a refugee.
But how valid is this definition for thinking about refugees in contexts other than the political and legal? How was the definition arrived at, and what does it mean in historical terms?
The international system for refugee protection under the United Nations has so entrenched our understanding of who is a refugee that it is almost completely disconnected from history. Is it now possible to conceive of refugees in earlier times—and even today—in a manner other than as defined in the 1951 Convention?
The Convention itself was the result of a long historical struggle to effect international solutions to major and recurring human rights problems—the dislocation, alienation, and the displacement of large populations from their homelands.
What can we learn from the history of refugees before the Convention? How can an understanding of the past help us with the problem of refugees today?
The symposium brings together historians, social scientists and legal scholars to reflect upon the following questions:
- How can we locate refugees in a longer human rights tradition? Suggested paths of inquiry are:
- Refugees as a barometer of tolerance and intolerance;
- Refugees and rights discourses before “Human Rights”;
- Conjunctures and disjuncture between refugee protection and human rights ideals.
- How do we make an historically informed evaluation of the values and principles that underpin refugee protection today? Approaches might include:
- The origin and development of these principles;
- Practical barriers to protection;
- The role of idealism and the political realities of refugee protection.
Speakers include Marilyn Lake (History, Latrobe); Klaus Neumann (Institute for Social Research, Swinburne); Maya Jasanoff, (Center for European Studies, Harvard University); Cassandra Pybus (History, Sydney); Kirsty Carpenter (History, Massey). Topics will include race, human rights and refugees, refugees in their historical contexts from the medieval period to the present, how have refugees been defined in history, how has history influenced the definition the refugee.
Enquiries can be addressed to
- Greg Burgess from the School of History, Heritage and Society at Deakin University (gburgess@deakin.edu.au, 03 5227 2987) and
- Megan Cassidy-Welch from the School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne (mecass@unimelb.edu.au, 03 8344 3355).
| Sponsored by: | |
Deakin University Faculty of Arts and Education | University of Melbourne Faculty of Arts |
