Katarzyna Nowak - Böcker

Across modern history, refugees have articulated their experiences and wishes against the backdrop of mass displacement brought about by world wars, civil war, revolution, population exchange, decolonisation, and state formation. Men and women displaced in different sites, from different backgrounds, and at different times have played for high stakes: they deliberated about what to say and to whom, and they sought, expected, and effected a response.Refugee Voices in Modern Global History places refugees at the centre of modern history. It demonstrates how ordinary refugees understood their experiences of displacement and engaged with institutions that sought 'solutions' to their predicament. Ranging widely across global contexts to establish what refugees had to say and to whom, it shows them to have consistently been purposeful actors, making it possible to transcend conventional and hackneyed depictions of 'crisis'.By adopting the term 'refugeedom' the authors show how the voices and perspectives of refugees can be incorporated alongside the power dynamics associated with the multiple incarnations of the refugee regime that 'managed' refugees and articulated 'solutions' to their predicament. Extensive archival research across three continents makes it possible to explain in comparative terms the significance attached to the encounters between refugees and officials in modern Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The result is an original and in-depth study of the contrasting responses of refugees to displacement and to the arrangements made on their behalf at a series of critical junctures in the past.

After World War II displaced more than sixty million people, Cold War politics opened global eyes and wallets to European displaced persons. The postwar experiences of more than three million forcibly displaced Polish people illuminate the painfully long process of reckoning with war and its fallout. Drawing on rich primary material unearthed in over a dozen archives, Kingdom of Barracks depicts the texture of everyday life in refugee camps in post–World War II Europe within a panorama of the social and cultural history of the twentieth century. Western Allies and Polish social elites construed the camps as spaces for rehabilitating and “re-civilizing” refugees to prepare them for the reconstruction of war-torn countries and a rebirth of the nation. On the ground, refugees lived in close proximity, sharing bug-infested barracks with people from other regions, social classes, and wartime experiences. Taking a bottom-up perspective and exploring the formation of cultural identity in exile through the lenses of class, gender, body, and nationality, Katarzyna Nowak argues that Polish DPs’ experiences of displacement stimulated a personal and a collective revival understood in religious and national terms.In an age of intensifying forced displacement, Kingdom of Barracks sheds new light on past experiences of war and migration that are still deeply relevant in the present.

Nearly half the world's primate species use flooded habitats at one time or another, from swamp-going Congo gorillas and mangrove-eating proboscis monkeys, to uacaris in Amazonian riverside forests. This first-ever volume on the subject brings together experts from around the world in a ground breaking volume spanning fossil history, current biology and future research and conservation priorities. Flooded habitats are a vital part of tropical biology, both for the diversity of the species they house, and the complexity of their ecological interactions, but are often completely overlooked. This book will set the stage for a new wave of research on primates in these extraordinarily productive and highly threatened areas, and is ideal for researchers and graduate students in primatology, zoology, ecology, and conservation.