ABSTRACT
The massive increase in the contemporary global population of displaced people has been expressed by one historian as “a new variety of collective alienation, one of the hallmarks of our time.”1 For most historians and social commentators, the condition of displacement and the categories of “refugee” and “displaced person” are inherently products of modernity, as they rest, for definition and response, on the “modern” conditions of nationality (one must belong to a nation state from which one is then alienated) and internationality (international organizations such as the United Nations are the right agencies to respond to this global issue). The definition of a refugee since the Second World War is, according to the United Nations:
an individual who … owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.2
