LONDON (AN) – While browsing in a bookstore in Bath, the renowned historian and author Peter Gatrell stumbled upon a posthumous collection of articles by the late journalist A.A. Gill. During a visit to Greece in 2015, when hundreds of thousands of people fled across the Mediterranean Sea to escape war and persecution, Gill had observed the contrast between the dramatic plight of refugees and oblivious British vacationers nearby.
For Gatrell, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Manchester, the scene set by Gill, depicting the challenges of Syrian refugees arriving on the island of Kos, encapsulated not only some of the ethical dilemmas of amplifying refugees' personal testimony, even with the noble intention of dramatizing human displacement, but it also set the stage for Gatrell’s central theme: the importance of hearing, and critically interpreting, the voices of the refugees themselves in archival material.
Delivering the Royal Historical Society's 2025 Prothero Lecture to a packed conference room in the Mary Ward House on Wednesday night, Gatrell delved beyond official narratives and statistics, using individual testimonies and bureaucratic archives to illuminate the complex realities and unexpected agency of displaced populations in modern history. The society's president, Lucy Noakes, a historian, author and professor at the University of Essex, said the lecture is traditionally given by a leading historian whose research shapes fundamentally how we regard the past.
In an era increasingly defined by global displacement, Gatrell challenged conventional views, arguing for a more nuanced approach toward refugees, not as a "fourth world" of anonymous victims but as active participants in shaping their own lives and, at times, influencing policy.
Gatrell then transported the audience back to 1973, referencing a pivotal speech by the late Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, then the remarkably young U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Speaking to the U.N. General Assembly, Sadruddin declared "the existence of what is, virtually, a fourth world. A world without representation in this or any other assembly, yet peopled by millions: refugees, the displaced and often stateless, and others in similar circumstances." Sadruddin, himself from an immensely privileged background, recognized the Eurocentric bias of the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, challenging it to recruit more non-Europeans – a move that, as Gatrell wryly noted, "set the cat among the pigeons in Geneva."
While acknowledging Sadruddin's crucial role in bringing attention to refugees' challenges, Gatrell meticulously deconstructed the limitations of applying this "fourth world" concept. UNHCR's mandate, established by the 1951 Refugee Convention, was inherently selective and exclusionary. Millions of displaced individuals, such as Palestinian refugees under UNRWA or internally displaced persons, fell outside its purview.
The "fourth world" often confined refugees to restrictive camps, failing to acknowledge the immense diversity of their experiences across age, gender, and background. Early institutional histories, such as UNHCR's own 50th anniversary publication in 2000, while shedding light on the agency's diplomacy, juxtaposed photographs of refugees with those of successive agency heads but largely presented the refugees as an "anonymous mass," their individual stories subsumed by the top-down managerial language of "crisis, challenges, and durable solutions."
Beyond bureaucracy: voices from the archives
To counter this depersonalized narrative, Gatrell championed a different kind of history, one gleaned from the vast and often underutilized archives of UNHCR. He drew parallels with British journalist Robert Kee's 1960 book, Refugee World, which sought to engage with the human cost of displacement by interacting directly with refugees in camps across Europe. Kee, himself a former prisoner of war, keenly observed the "gulf of understanding between official and refugees" and the dehumanizing bureaucratic language of "caseload" and "programs." He was particularly struck by the notion that "a lot went on in the refugee world but never got near" the High Commissioner or others in their precisely worded files.
Those voices form the bedrock of Gatrell's years of painstaking research. He described a veritable treasure trove of personal testimonies, written often "at considerable length, and often in permanent prose," providing an unparalleled window into the "intensity of refugees' experiences and the immediacy of their self-expression." While acknowledging the ethical complexities of and questions around intruding upon such personal details, Gatrell emphasized the invaluable insights these documents offer.
A new book co-authored by Gatrell, Refugee Voices in Modern Global History: Reckoning with Refugeedom, published by Oxford University Press, puts refugees at the center of modern history, showing how ordinary refugees understood their displacement and engaged with institutions that sought "solutions" to their predicament. It calls attention to the agency of refugees, challenging traditional narratives of them as passive victims.
He shared compelling examples, such as the heart-wrenching letters of Georgios, a Greek police officer who fled in 1968 after defying the military junta. His desperate pleas to UNHCR, punctuated by lines like "nobody hears us. I hope this letter of ours will be read and the answer will be given. A good answer, which can become a medicine or a bandage which can stop bleeding from our hearts," painted a vivid picture of the endless uncertainty and vulnerability of refugee life.
Gatrell also highlighted cases of European refugees who, even after resettlement in countries like Canada, wrote vitriolic letters denouncing them as "penal colonies" or "concentration camps," revealing that "successful resettlement" was not always a panacea. Such cases, often dismissed by UNHCR as "mental illness" or "character defects," nonetheless carried a poignant plea: "Even if I'm not a refugee from the 1951 Convention, I am a human being, and I live in this world."
Challenging the system: agency and resilience
Gatrell showed how refugees, far from being passive recipients of aid, actively engaged with and challenged a system designed to protect them. He cited a Hungarian refugee who, in 1965, confronted UNHCR's legal expert about the inconsistent application of the 1951 Convention toward Jewish refugees from Egypt. Her observation about UNHCR's ability to circumvent chronological and geographical limitations may have contributed to the 1967 Protocol, which removed these restrictions.
Even more striking were instances where refugees became history teachers themselves. A group of Kurdish refugees from Syria, arriving in Sweden in 1970, provided a detailed "contemporary history" of the Syrian government's genocidal policies, successfully pressing Swedish authorities for asylum. Others, like a Cameroonian law student, articulated clear internationalist positions, referencing historical figures like Giuseppe Mazzini and the lessons of the two world wars to argue for "peace and justice" and to "fight for victory over evil."
Some refugees even dared to imagine entirely new forms of belonging. Gatrell recounted a proposal by Mediha, a 44-year-old Albanian woman writing to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1955, who envisioned a "state of their own in the form of an reservation, following the noble example of the USA, where by constitution it was given a place to the Indians under the sun."
While Gatrell cautioned against an uncritical view of America's treatment of its First Nations, he noted the "old willingness to articulate a political response on behalf of refugees at large." Even more intriguingly, some refugees sought neither state protection nor a state of their own, but demanded statelessness, viewing it as a path to "international mobility" and a rejection of nationalistic paradigms that had caused their suffering.
The enduring legacy of the "refugee world"
Gatrell concluded by reiterating the enduring significance of the "refugee world." It is, he argued, an anomaly in a world predicated on national belonging, a realm where individuals qualify for recognition and protection under international law, and where they are often physically segregated in camps. However, crucially, he emphasized that for many, the label of "refugee" was not a stigma, but a "rallying cry in support of their demands for restitution," a source of "pride" and a catalyst for "collective mobilization in defense of their rights."
Gatrell's lecture served as a powerful call to action for historians and all of us to look beyond simplistic narratives and to engage with the rich, often untold stories of refugees. By paying "close attention to the dynamic interaction between multiple actors – governments, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, and by refugees themselves," he said, we can begin to truly understand the complex, multifaceted, and deeply human history of displacement.
"The novelist Joseph Roth once said that it's the things we're not told that arouse our interest," he concluded. "How to evade the realm of the intimate with expectations of those in authority. How to respond ethically to the testimony of those who occupy a larger position in society. How to reflect upon our own positionality as historians, and not least, how to communicate issues of recurrent concern for a wider audience whose appetite for history can surely accommodate and inform discussion of the refugee world."
