Introduction: Border Politics and Refugee Narratives in Contemporary Literature

Resumo

Refugeehood—whether triggered by religious intolerance, ethnic strife, political repression, war, or environmental factors—has been a constant throughout human history, but it was not until the twentieth century that refugees were endowed with legal status on an international level. The 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees—later consolidated and provided with universal application through the 1967 Protocol—defined the term “refugee” as a status entitled to any person who “is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion” (United Nations 1951, Article 1(A)2). As a legal category, the status of “refugee” has provided protection to many forcibly displaced people, and yet in its current formulation it falls short of accommodating many other patterns of forced displacement, such as those involving internally displaced individuals or “eco-refugees”—that is, people forced to flee their homes due to droughts, soil erosion, desertification, deforestation, and other environmental phenomena (Myers and Kent 1995, p. 14). Problematising this label and its legal application, as some of the articles in this Special Issue do, is an urgent discussion, particularly in a period when the scale of forced human displacement, far from subsiding, has continued to grow. The conflicts raging in the Middle East, the ongoing political unrest in Africa and Latin America, the humanitarian crisis triggered by the ongoing climate crisis, and, more recently, the Russia–Ukraine war in Europe have forced millions of people to flee their homes.