About

The Unlike Refuge? is a 5-year comparative research project funded by the European Research Council (Consolidator grant) and hosted by the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

The project aims to write refugees back into the history of East-Central Europe, a region which is often considered a place to leave rather than to search refuge in. Since September 2019, the project team has been systematically probing the interactions of civil societies, humanitarian organisations and nation-states with refugees in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and their successor states in the 20th century.

The project deploys methods from spatial studies and combines traditional historical enquiry with digital humanities methods. It attempts to produce new microhistorical studies of refugee spaces and analyses of life trajectories of selected samples of refugees.

Research team

• Michal Frankl, Principle Investigator, scientific coordinator and expert on Czechoslovak refugee policies.
• Doina Anca Cretu focuses on refugee camps in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the First World War.
• Lidia Zessin-Jurek explores the issue of refugees to Poland with focus on the late 1930s.
• Ágnes Katalin Kelemen investigates the conceptual history of refugeedom in Hungary.
• Maximilian Graf researches refugees from communist countries in Austria.
• Nikola Karasová concentrates on Cold War refugees in Czechoslovakia.
• Julia Reinke on Greek refugees in the German Democratic Republic and the Polish People’s Republic.
• Francesca Rolandi scrutinizes refugees to Yugoslavia with focus on the Upper Adriatic region.
• Karla Koutková, social anthropologist, examines the refugeedom in post-communist East-Central Europe.

Conferences and workshops

• Refugees to East-Central Europe in the 1990s March 7, 2022

Events and news

• The UnRef Team at the “Humans in Motion” Conference July 13, 2022
• New Publications: “Polish (and Jewish) World War II Exiles in Hungary” and “A Czech Polemic on Migration” July 7, 2022
• Comparing Cultures of Solidarity: Conference Paper on Refugees from Greece in the GDR and Czechoslovakia June 21, 2022
• Michal Frankl at RefuFest 2022 (Full Video Available) June 21, 2022