The conclusion sums up the main arguments of the book on the formative albeit discreet role of caravan trade in the political economy of the Middle East both during and after the Ottoman period. It draws on this history to challenge recent directions in the history of the Middle East by advocating for inner perspectives on connections thanks to the crossing of endogenous documentation (in Arabic and in Ottoman) with foreign sources, more attention for legacy, resilience and slowness in a period of rapid technological and political transformation. The history of caravan supports a new way of considering the Middle East from inside. It also offers insights on the background of debates over past carbonisation and present decarbonisation.

This chapter critically examines the long-debated issue of Turkey’s state security and survival discourse through the lens of the securitisation logic of protection in order to unpack how the AKP government has used an expansive definition of security threat to allow for the suppression of the basic rights of dissenters by invoking the need to protect the state. The first section presents an historical account of the discourse on Turkey’s primary referent object of security – state survival (beka sorunu). The second section describes the Turkish state’s current security flagging of refugees as ‘risky outsiders’ and of those purged as ‘dangerous insiders’. The last section examines state authorisation of various auxiliary armed security agents and forces. I argue that in lieu of protecting its citizens, the AKP’s authoritarian securitisation state protects the state, the discursive ‘nation,’ and the security apparatus, a practice it legitimizes via a discourse of terrorism insecurity.

The transnational movement of peoples across the globe is one of the most bitterly contested political issues of our times, eliciting populist anger against migrants and refugees. This public outcry has muffled, however, a more dramatic process: the contemporaneous reconfiguration of territory, rights, and jurisdiction. This chapter highlights the formation of “shifting borders” that enable states to create lawless zones as well as rightless subjects. It then explores a combination of juridical and democratic possibilities for resistance and claims-making in a world of shifting borders and cosmopolitanism without illusions.

A principal obstacle to protecting forced migrants is a legal regime that sharply distinguishes refugees from other migrants. But responses to migration are badly hobbled if they rely on a belief that this refugee–migrant line is clear. It would be a grave mistake to think that any country can dismiss forced migrants who reach its borders but fall outside the refugee definition. The disregard of displaced and suffering people is an unacceptable affront to human dignity. One way to rethink the protection of forced migrants is to understand that forced migrants are not just as survivors in flight, but multidimensional people who will shape the societies where they find protection. Just as it is essential to avoid the deceptive simplicity of a line between refugees and other migrants, it is also essential to consider opening up labor migration pathways to forced migrants who don’t qualify as refugees. Protection may also mean offering shelter that is provisionally temporary but available to a greater number of people. These two approaches to protection – coordination with labor migration and provisionally temporary protection – must be in addition to core protections based on the 1951 Refugee Convention.

This chapter explores arguments for assistance and asylum (nonrefoulement) that those who are driven by climate to cross international borders can and should claim. It seeks to amend the standards developed by the Model International Mobility Convention and it draws upon the jurisprudence of the Teitiota Case and other recent cases that probe claims for asylum based on climate necessity. It addresses the 2022 Torres Straits Island Case and the significant additional protections it recognizes under international human rights law. It concludes that relying on general human rights conventions such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is not adequate and that a special convention focused on climate refugees is required along the lines of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which specifically addressed those facing “persecution” on grounds of “race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion.”

This chapter explores whether the arguments in this book can extend to the third type of strategic displacement – depopulation – and not just forced relocation. To do so, it examines the use of displacement by pro-government forces during the civil war in Syria. This chapter analyzes quantitative and qualitative data from a range of sources, including media reports, human rights records, data on violence and displacement collected by nongovernmental organizations, and interviews with activists, journalists, combatants, and regime defectors that were conducted in Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon. The findings question the common characterization of state-induced displacement in Syria as ethno-sectarian cleansing and challenge the notion that these tactics have been intended solely, or even primarily, to achieve demographic change. The regime induced displacement to separate and differentiate the loyal from the disloyal, improve the “legibility” of local communities, and extract much-needed revenues, military recruits, and symbolic benefits from the population – showing that strategies of depopulation can also exhibit the sorting logic of strategic displacement, similar to strategies of forced relocation.

The fall of Saigon marked the end of the Vietnam War as well as the most dramatic turning point in the history of the Vietnamese diaspora. From the mid 1970s and the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees were resettled in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. Their lives were defined by concurrent and overlapping experiences of national loss, family separation, and difficulties among their loved ones in Vietnam amidst their own survival and adaptation in the new societies. They constructed their exilic identity through a host of media and built exilic communities through internal migration. Starting in the late 1980s, legal migration led tens of thousands of other Vietnamese to Little Saigon communities. In turn, they have enlarged the economic and political prowess of those communities, and helped to shift the collective experience from an exilic identity to a transnational identity.

In the two decades after 1975, over 1 million Vietnamese resettled in the United States. New resettlement programs arose not only in 1975 with the fall of Saigon and in the years immediately thereafter, but also in 1979, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1989, and 1996. These initiatives resulted from unilateral US policies, multilateral programs organized under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, bilateral programs negotiated between Washington and Hanoi, and, often, a combination of the three. This chapter explores how the Vietnamese diaspora influenced the American approach to normalization with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV). It argues that normalization was a protracted process that unfolded over decades and that negotiating and implementing migration programs was a central part of the that process. The US approach to post-1975 US–SRV relations saw significant input from nonexecutive actors. Nonstate actors provided information and political pressure, and created close relationships with elected officials outside the White House, especially members of Congress. These groups, the actions of first-asylum nations, and other transnational forces combined to make negotiating and implementing migration programs a US priority. The contact, cooperation, and compromise that process required normalized US–Vietnamese relations, despite US assertions to the contrary.

This chapter introduces cases motivating the book and presents a three-step argument about the effects of forced migration on societal cooperation, state capacity, and economic development. It reviews evidence from post-WWII displacement in Poland and West Germany, discusses the applicability of the findings to other cases, and highlights the main contributions of the book.

The epilogue brings the narrative from the early years of the new century to recent events, just before sending the manuscript to print, in mid 2024. It tells of the changing attitudes in Germany both towards Jews living in that country and towards Israel and its policies of occupation in the Palestinian West Bank. The unique German–Israeli relationship during the last two decades is sketched against the background of the past, and finally, it is attempted to draw a balance between the apparent achievement of a decent Jewish life in Germany, on the one hand, and the new dangers of a rising politically organized right, simultaneously with a growing critique of Israel and the apparent emergence of a new antisemitism, on the other hand.

This chapter investigates how civilians sort truth from lies in the context of the Syrian civil war. In particular, it plumbs a rich batch of semi-structured interviews conducted with Syrian refugees in Turkey that was generously shared by Schon (2020). These interviews include people’s confidence in their truth discernment ability – their ability to distinguish true vs. false information – during the war, along with detailed information on what they heard and experienced while they were in Syria. The chapter analyzes these interviews with a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative analyses show that those who spent longer in Syria, witnessed a wider range of events in the war, and explicitly rely on personal experience to assess new information are much more confident in their truth discernment ability. This is supported by ample qualitative material from the interviews, which demonstrates how Syrian refugees put stock in many of these same factors and drew many of these same connections themselves when discussing informational dynamics in the war.