Dispossession and Forced Migration in the 21st-century Middle East and North Africa

AbstractRefugees, exiles and the internally displaced have become de fining features of the social landscape of the 21st-century Middle East and North Africa. Yet, perhaps still, when one thinks of refugees in the Middle East, it is the nearly ¾ of a million people who fled the former British-mandated Palestine in 1948 who generally come to mind. They are certainly not the first case of large-scale dispossession and displacement in the Middle East, nor are they the last as we have seen with the recent large-scale exodus from Iraq after 2003. For the past 100 years, the Middle East and North Africa have been host to numerous refugee groups, some integrating into their host communities and others maintaining a separateness in their wish to return. Each refugee crisis teaches us something about how people develop identities and hold on to or dismiss new categories and statuses associated with them. Each case of exile and uprooting is unique, but each case teaches us something about ourselves as human beings ...