Refugee Voices in Modern Global History

‘I am so tired; I have been suffering too much during my life and I am overwhelmed with grief’. Thus wrote Anastasia Mouravieff, a refugee of Russian origin, in a letter to the police commissioner in Bombay (Mumbai) in November 1920. She ended with a dramatic flourish: ‘I am like a living dead body’. A trained midwife, Anastasia left Russia after the 1917 revolution and eventually made her way to India. We don’t know what became of her. It’s possible that she made her way to a third country, such as Brazil. Russia would have been out of the question. But the trail goes cold. Mouravieff’s letter survives in records of the India Office in the British Library. There are countless more such displaced men and women who have left traces behind in the historical record.

Exploring the written testimonies of refugees from 1917 – mid 1970

Readers of these blog posts will know that today’s refugees speak about their situation at first hand, not least because they can be interviewed by scholars in refugee studies. But what of those who cannot be interviewed because of the passage of time? The written testimony and requests of refugees in past decades form the basis of the book that Kasia Nowak, Anindita Ghoshal, Lauren Banko and I co-authored: Refugee Voices in Modern Global History: Reckoning with Refugeedom (OUP, 2025). Our overarching aim was to establish and analyse what refugees in different parts of the world from the end of the First World War to the mid-1970s said of their experiences and to whom they communicated their views, hopes and expectations.

Sources: national governments and intergovernmental organisations

As in the case of Anastasia Mouravieff, we located these sources in various places, including in government archives such as in India. We drew extensively on the archival holdings of intergovernmental organisations: the League of Nations in the interwar era, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the International Refugee Organisation (1947-51), and UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, for the period after 1951. This broad chronological and institutional coverage enabled us to analyse the letters and petitions of Russian and Armenian refugees in the interwar period; European Displaced Persons (DPs), victims of Nazi forced labour recruitment during the Second World War who were detained in camps prior to their repatriation or resettlement; refugees in South Asia, especially Bengali refugees following partition in 1947 who resettled in independent India; Palestinian refugees in the wake of the Nakba; and refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, many of whom were students seeking support to further their education.

How refugees engaged with and petitioned the organisations governing ‘refugeedom’

Refugees became aware, whether through the media or through word of mouth, of the options available to them and whom they could address as they (in the words of historian Martyn Lyons) ‘wrote upwards’. The subtitle of Refugee Voices in Modern Global History is ‘reckoning with refugeedom’, a term coined in Russia during the First World War that, in the midst of mass internal displacement, expressed a distinct status and category. The term appealed to us, because it takes account of what has come to be called the refugee regime, whether configured at a local, national or international level, but also because it provided a lens through which to think about issues such as social categorisation, downward social mobility, the cultural representation of refugees and their enlistment for political ends. It made us think also about how refugees themselves understood the world and the extent to which they exercised what has come to be called agency, albeit in the context of multiple constraints.

Archives as a site of power and vulnerability

We explored how refugees expressed a range of emotions. We also acknowledged our own emotional reactions as researchers, confronting feelings of responsibility, discomfort, and empathy when encountering personal stories often marked by trauma or exclusion. We reflected on the archive as both a site of power and vulnerability, recognizing its ability to shape whose stories are told while also disclosing the material traces of individual lives. We discussed the archive’s capacity to preserve and erase, noting the frequent gaps and silences caused by institutional decisions, bureaucratic priorities, or acts of self-censorship by refugees.

And finally… refugees’ creativity

Through their letters, refugees navigated officialdom in ways that demonstrated a creative response to refugeedom. Some of them included sketches to make a dramatic point, such as Leonti L. who wrote to UNHCR in 1956 to complain about the delays in resettling him from Shanghai to a non-communist country. Ahmed T., a young Algerian refugee, contacted UNHCR from an address in Casablanca in 1960, asking about being treated for his tuberculosis in a foreign clinic. He signed off with the letters ‘S.O.S’ in block capital; inside the letter ‘O’ he pasted a small black and white photograph of his face for added dramatic effect.

This is an appropriate point on which to conclude, because it draws attention to the many ways in which refugees engaged with the refugee regime and challenged those in positions of authority to do a better job of understanding their perspectives. The challenge is no less imperative for historians of refugeedom.

Images used with permission of UNHCR Records and Archives

Professor Gatrell delivered a public seminar ‘Refugee Voices in Modern Global History: Reckoning with Refugeedom’ at the Refugee Studies Centre on 10 June, 2026.

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Acknowledgement

The underpinning research was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust. We are also grateful to the archivists who kept us supplied with material.

Related publications

Peter Gatrell, “Refugeedom: Making Room in the Crowded Conceptual Terrain”, Social Research, vol. 91, no. 2, 2024, 619-641 

Peter Gatrell, “Raw Material: UNHCR’s Individual Case Files as a Historical Source, 1951–75”, History Workshop Journal, vol. 92, Autumn 2021, 226–241 

Katarzyna Nowak, Kingdom of Barracks: Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria (2023) 

Anindita Ghoshal, Refugees, Borders and Identities Rights and Habitat in East and Northeast India (2021) 

Martyn Lyons, "Writing Upwards: How the Weak Wrote to the Powerful." Journal of Social History, vol. 49, no. 2, 2015, 317-330 

Clara Lecadet, ‘Letters from the camps: UNHCR and refugee voices’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 2026