ABSTRACT
Refugees have long been interconnected with geopolitical conflicts. The nature of that interconnection and the effects on refugees have varied greatly. This essay draws on a range of historical cases to indicate the breadth of that variation in three main directions. First, a consideration of the eighteenth-century expulsion of the French Catholic Acadians from what is now Atlantic Canada, illustrates how global conflicts—in that case between England and France—can lead to outright forcible expulsion. Second, the situation of displaced persons after World War II illustrates another dynamic in which people are stranded in a different place, or remain in the same physical place but with borders shifted around them. Third is the more conventional situation in which refugees make decisions to flee and bear the costs not only of flight itself but of their own decisions on whether and how to flee—decisions that may well put them and their families in even greater danger. What makes all these cases so complex is the shifting nature of the political context that creates the movement of refugees, that channels it toward some places and away from others, and that is itself often changed by those refugee movements.
