Following the large-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, policymakers and humanitarian actors urgently sought to anticipate displacement flows within Ukraine. However, existing internal displacement data systems had not been adapted to contexts as dynamic as a full-fledged war marked by uneven trigger events. A year and a half later, policymakers and practitioners continue to seek forecasts, needing to anticipate how many internally displaced persons (IDPs) can be expected to return to their areas of origin and how many will choose to stay and seek a durable solution in their place of displacement. This article presents a case study of an anticipatory approach deployed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Mission in Ukraine since March 2022, delivering nationwide displacement figures less than 3 weeks following the invasion alongside near real-time data on mobility intentions as well as key data anticipating the timing, direction, and volume of future flows and needs related to IDP return and (re)integration. The authors review pre-existing mobility forecasting approaches, then discuss practical experiences with mobility prediction applications in the Ukraine response using the Ukraine General Population Survey (GPS), including in program and policy design related to facilitating durable solutions to displacement. The authors focus on the usability and ethics of the approach, already considered for replication in other displacement contexts.

This paper explores the theoretical and analytic possibilities of the concept of gharīb to offer a new understanding of regional displacement in what we know as the modern Middle East. The concept of gharīb (pl. ghurabāʾ) has accrued a wide range of meanings across time and space, including stranger, outcast, and exile, as well as pauper. By occupying the space between estrangement and poverty, the gharīb allows for an intersectional understanding of inequality, experienced by a growing number of marginalized and displaced communities in the Middle East. This paper honors the gharīb while making an analytic shift away from the category of the “refugee,” which has long been the dominant framework for personhood in the study of displacement. Combining genealogical analysis of the word gharīb with ethnographic accounts of displaced and impoverished communities in post-2011 Lebanon, I argue that legal binaries such as refugee versus citizen, and internal versus external displacement, have been further blurred against the backdrop of ongoing and interlocking forms of structural violence, inequality, and lack of protection for marginalized groups. The right to belong, therefore, is less about citizenry and more about a mode of social and economic poverty. This is particularly the case in the margins, where the repercussions of the ongoing crises are first and foremost felt. The gharīb, in contrast to such legal binaries, can be an analytic tool that allows us to delve deeper into the complexities of belonging, futurity, and rights without falling into the traps of methodological nationalism and top-down regional demarcations.

This article conceptualises voice as a constellation, examining how objects, images, and sounds (or their absence) speak to the lived experiences of displacement. Drawing from a British Academy-funded project with a Syrian artist collective and a women-led social entrepreneurship initiative in Istanbul, we explore the affective assemblages of loss, belonging, and forced displacement through an ethnographic mode of listening. Bringing together a crocheted life jacket, a painting, and a piece of music that cannot be played, we consider how a politics of listening can offer new ways of understanding forced displacement and agency beyond voice as speech or narrative. We advocate for an approach that foregrounds thick solidarity, collective expression, and intersubjective relations of vocality.

Are people more inclined to help strangers when they’ve experienced similar hardships? People who have experienced displacement could be tremendous allies to the newly displaced, but they are relatively understudied. This study explores how people who have experienced wartime displacement respond to refugees fleeing new violence. I prime Serbs who experienced wartime displacement with either (1) their experience of displacement or (2) their ethnic identity. I then measure their altruism toward Syrian refugees traveling the Balkan route. Compared to participants who were reminded of their ethnic identity, participants who were reminded of their displacement were no more generous toward displaced Syrians. In fact, participants who experienced displacement, as well as wartime violence, were more generous toward the refugees when they were reminded of their ethnic identity. These results suggest that shared hardship alone may not necessarily enhance refugee inclusion. The results further suggest that interventions may benefit from calling out the differences between hosts and refugees—in this case, on the dimension of ethnicity. These findings caution humanitarians to construct their interventions with care.

How does one prepare for flight? Is it possible to plan for such a disruptive event? This article explores a unique publication project established precisely for that purpose: migration manuals published by a German-Jewish organization to support the masses of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s. These manuals consolidated elaborate information from all over the world to prepare Jews for impending displacement. They encompassed not only essential details but also impressions, recommendations, and complaints. The manuals’ editors assembled reports from individuals already settled in refuge, generating a collaborative self-help effort on a global scale. Analyzing their content, this article shows that the process of guiding readers into forced migration extended in this case beyond technical migration procedures to include knowledge transfer about the politics of race, class, and gender, reflecting how German-Jewish refugees studied and situated themselves within these categories.

Menstrual hygiene management (MHM) is an important but often neglected aspect of women’s health worldwide, especially in developing and disaster-prone countries, such as Bangladesh. This qualitative study aimed to investigate awareness, attitudes, and practices related to MHM among girls in the Haor region, particularly during floods. The study adopts a phenomenological approach, and data were collected using purposive sampling from 33 women aged 15 years and above who resided in the Haor region. Thematic analysis was employed to identify the patterns, themes, and subthemes within the qualitative data. The study reveals a significant lack of widespread knowledge about menstruation among girls in the Haor area, which is associated with unfavourable family and social attitudes, and stigma or taboos. Natural hazards, cultural barriers, access to the market, economic incapacity, and inadequate infrastructure make it very difficult to manage menstruation, which is especially aggravated during floods due to displacement and shelter on the roadside, primary schools, and other people’s houses. This research emphasises the need for tailored MHM programmes from the government to address the unique challenges faced by women in Haor regions. Provision of sanitary napkins and essential medicines, maintaining stock in shelters, and equipping community clinics with MHM-related healthcare services are essential. Finally, NGOs should prioritise MH within their scope of work.

This article explores the path of the microscopic phylloxera insect as it made its way from the United States to the Eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth century. As the pest devastated vineyards in Western Europe it also catalyzed grape production in the western Ottoman Empire around Izmir, before this region, too, succumbed. One response to the outbreak was the first legal code controlling plant traffic across nations, and another was an effort to plant American rootstocks, which were relatively resistant. The Ottoman response to phylloxera offers another example of the ways in which the alleged “sick man of Europe” was actually much more dynamic than its detractors insisted. The invocation of phylloxera moreover became a way for post-Ottoman states like Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia to protect their national grape economies. The article’s broader analysis explains how the shared environment of the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean incubated both the spread of phylloxera and—in the protectionist legal regimes formed in response—the architecture of the region’s peculiarly integrated disconnection. The article closes by considering the agriculture of displacement amidst the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, and how it further entrenched these dynamics as migrants took vines with them and planted them in the remarkably similar environments of their new national homes.