The challenges at our borders aren’t new. That’s why OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) and the ECR Consolidator Grant Project Unlikely Refuge? have brought together historians and human rights defenders to discuss refugee protection in Central and Eastern Europe, past and present. To respond wisely in […]
Yearly Archives: 2025
14 posts
On 26 June 2025, Nikola Tohma received the 2025 CEFRES Platform Award for the Best Article in Social Sciences and Humanities. This award is organized by the French Embassy to the Czech Republic, CEFRES, and its Platform with the support of the Young Talent Foundation. Nikola received the award for her article […]
Migrants and Refugees at Work in the 20th-Century East Central Europe Prague, 19-20 November 2025 The workshop is organized by the project “Migration and Us: Mobility, Refugeedom and Border from the Humanities Perspective (MyGRACE)“, registration number CZ.02.01.01/00/23_025/0008741, supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic […]
Participation, Knowledge Production and Collaboration Prague, December 1-2, 2025 Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in cooperation with the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Innsbruck University Venue: Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Na […]
To register, please write to unref-public@mua.cas.cz by 15 June at the latest. For download, click here
Greek Refugees in Socialist Czechoslovakia: The State of the Art and Future Research Opportunities by Nikola Tohma The paper analyzes the existing research on Greek Civil War refugees, particularly in the Czechoslovak context, and discusses possible new research trajectories. Highlighting the available archival sources, oral history interviews, and memoirs, the […]
Francesca Rolandi, Coping with Post-Imperial Fluidity. Refugees from Fiume between Different State Authorities (1919-1921), in “Contemporanea, Rivista di storia dell’800 e del ‘900” 1/2025, pp. 35-58, doi: 10.1409/116594 This article explores the episode that saw a number of pro-Yugoslav individuals escaping Fiume during D’Annunzio’s rule and seeking refuge in the […]
A report on the workshop “Petitioning on the Move”, written by Emilia Henkel (Historisches Institut, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität-Jena), was published on H-Soz-Kult. The workshop was organized by Masaryk Institute and Archives, Czech Academy of Sciences; in cooperation with the ERC-funded projects “NEPOSTRANS – Negotiating post-imperial transitions: from remobilization to nation-state consolidation. A […]
Nikola Tohma (Masaryk Institute and Archives, Czech Academy of Sciences) and Khalida Azhigulova (Eurasian Technological University) will present in the online session entitled “Unsung asylum: The law and practice of refugee hosting in communist and authoritarian states.” It is organized within the 15th International Refugee Law Seminar Series: Moments in Refugee History […]
We are pleased to share the information that our colleague Francesca Rolandi has just published her article Yugoslavia is (not) a Refugee Country? Refugees between Transit and Integration in an Ever-Changing Socialist State in the Nationalities Papers. The text is available as open-access! Throughout the Cold War, Yugoslavia was the […]
The recently published collective volume Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe (ed. R. Chin – S.C. Huneke; Cornell University Press 2025) features a book chapter on citizenship and statelessness of Greek Civil War refugees in Czechoslovakia, written by the UnRef team member Nikola Tohma. Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe maps the generation and […]
Prague, June 18-20, 2025 Organised by the ERC Consolidator project Unlikely Refuge? Refugees and Citizens in East-Central Europe in the 20th Century, Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences In the decades following the Second World War, the image of refugee protection became increasingly associated with the […]