Refugees and citizens in East-Central Europe in the 20th century

Francesca Rolandi: Framing Refugeedom in Interwar Yugoslavia (Article)

Read the new open-access article by Francesca Rolandi entitled “Genuinely Anti-Communist, Tactically Anti-Fascist. Framing Refugeedom in Interwar Yugoslavia (1918–1935)”, published in the recent issue of the Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju.

This article looks at how the Yugoslav state-making process affected the country’s attitude toward refugees, and it describes the challenges that refugees faced when adjusting to their lived reality in the host country. In particular, this article considers the impact of both foreign policy and domestic preoccupations in shaping allegiances and rivalries between a variety of actors in the local political landscape and society, on the one hand, and between the different refugee groups, on the other. Finally, the article explores the top-down spatial management of refugees, alongside the strategies refugees pursued to respond to attempts at governing their mobility.