Borders, Belonging, and Refugee Memory since the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange

Abstract

What cultural, historical, institutional, and legal paradigms have the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange bequeathed to national and transnational practices of border-making, border-crossing, and heritage-claiming over the past century, and how have subsequent experiences reshaped the original paradigm? We approach this question through four distinct categories: namely, the historical trajectory of refugee identity and its different political and cultural legacies in Greece and Turkey; the racialization of religion, which has helped to rewrite the boundaries of citizenship and belonging over the past century; the paradigm of peacekeeping by partition that the Population Exchange handed down to the international diplomatic norms of subsequent decades, along with the widespread regime of unseeing on which it depends; and, finally, memory practices that establish templates for remembering refugee pasts as well as making sense of contemporary crises.