Forced Migration And Scientific Change

Examines the impact on the scienctific world of the forced exodus of Jewish intellectuals from Nazi Germany.

This book is one of the outputs of the conference on ‘Environmental Change, Forced Migration, and Social Vulnerability’ (EFMSV) held in Bonn in October 2008. Migration is one of the oldest adaptation measures of humanity. Indeed, without migration the multitude of civilizations and interactions between them – peaceful and otherwise – would be hard to imagine. The United Nations (UN)-led global dialogue on migration is a clear sign that governments and the specialized UN agencies and bodies have recognized the need to view, govern, manage, and facilitate migration; to mitigate its negative effects; and to capitalize on the positive ones. It is a common expectation among experts that environmentally induced migration will further increase in the decades to come. Hence, next to the political, economic, ethnic, social, financial, humanitarian, and security aspects of migration, the environmental component should urgently be considered in the ongoing international dialogue on migration. This need is also a challenge. Without appropriate scientific knowledge, assessment, definitions, and classifications, the intergovernmental frameworks would not be able to deal with these complex phenomena. The Five-Pronged-Approach as formulated by the United Nations University (UNU) may serve as a framework to identify the additional dimensions of this challenge next to – and actually simultaneously with – the scientific one.

This is a key study into whether 'climate change refugees' are protected by international law. It examines the reasons why people do or do not move; how far climate change is a trigger for movement; and whether traditional international responses, such as creating new treaties and new institutions, are appropriate solutions in this context.

The forced migration of neuroscientists, both during and after the Second World War, is of growing interest to international scholars. Of particular interest is how the long-term migration of scientists and physicians has affected both the academic migrants and their receiving environments. As well as the clash between two different traditions and systems, this migration forced scientists and physicians to confront foreign institutional, political, and cultural frameworks when trying to establish their own ways of knowledge generation, systems of logic, and cultural mentalities. The twentieth century has been called the century of war and forced-migration, since it witnessed two devastating world wars, prompting a massive exodus that included many neuroscientists and psychiatrists. Fascism in Italy and Spain beginning in the 1920s, Nazism in Germany and Austria between the 1930s and 1940s, and the impact of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe all forced more than two thousand researchers with prior education in neurology, psychiatry, and the basic brain research disciplines to leave their scientific and academic home institutions. This edited volume, comprising of thirteen chapters written by international specialists, reflects on the complex dimensions of intellectual migration in the neurosciences and illustrates them by using relevant case studies, biographies, and surveys. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Politics - Topic: Globalization, Political Economics, grade: 1,3, Maastricht University, course: Migration: People on the Move, language: English, abstract: Since coming into power in 1933, the national socialists in Germany pursued their oppressing, discriminating and racist policies even in the fields of science. They tried to control all aspects of life, including culture, science and education. Many decrees and orders pushed disliked and “non-Aryan” economists, scientists and scholars out of their sphere of activity and replaced them with followers of their regime. Overall about half a million people migrated from the NS-regime. 12,000 of them were part of the former German intellectual elite. Among them were about 1,700 academic scholars, which will be the focus of this paper. Not everyone could escape easily, because the immigration policies of the receiving countries were not only driven by humanity and often strict. Besides the ideal of “free science”, most countries were anxious to submit suitable applicants including persons whose work in the world of science, of the arts or business and industry may be advantageous to their country. Also they had to consider the politics of internal and foreign affairs. However, a lot of scientists were supported by special organizations which were designed to help high skilled workers with their emigration. But still it was not easy for them to integrate in the new countries. In their receiving countries the former German elite has made enormous progress in research and even made an impact on post-war Germany. The common view is that the receiving countries gained while Germany lost due to this brain drain. The paper discusses the question whether this view is appropriate and points out that it is problematic to handle with these simple terms. Beyond that, it claims that one cannot speak of a emigration-induced scientific change without considering many prerequisites.

This volume includes in a unique way theoretical and empirical contributions on the context of forced migration and resilience from the perspective of psychology and social sciences. Contributions range from analyses of individual vulnerability and exposition to investigations of community and policy reactions in host countries.

This authoritative and comprehensive edited volume presents current research on how demography can contribute to generating scientific knowledge and evidence concerning refugees and forced migration, developing evidence based policy recommendations on protection for forced migrants and reception of refugees, and revealing the determinants and consequences of migration for origin and destination regions and communities. Refugee and other forced migrations have increased substantially in scale, complexity and diversity in recent decades. These changes challenge traditional approaches in response to refugee and other forced migration situations, and protection of refugees. Demography has an important contribution to make in this analytic space. While other disciplines (especially anthropology, law, geography, political science and international relations) have made major contributions to refugee and forced migration studies, demography has been less present with most research focusing on issues of refugee mortality and morbidity. This book specifies the range of topics for which a demographic approach is highly appropriate, and identifies findings of demographic research which can contribute to ever more effective policy making in this important arena of human welfare and international policy.

Recent debates on migration have demonstrated the important role of concepts in academic and political discourse. The contributions to this collection revisit established analytical categories in the study of migration such as border regimes, orders of belonging, coloniality, translation, trans/national digital culture and memory. Exploring notions, images and realities of migration in their cultural framings, this volume sheds light on the powerful work of these concepts. Including perspectives on migration from history, visual studies, pedagogy, literary and cultural studies, cultural anthropology and sociology, it explores the complex scholarly and popular notions of migration with particular focus on their often unspoken assumptions and political implications. Revisiting established analytical tools in the study of migration, the interdisciplinary contributions explore new approaches and point to the importance of conceptual nuance extending beyond academic discourse.