Diasporas, Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees from Europe in the Middle East and North Africa from the 18th to the 21st Century

This blog series is an outcome and continuation of the workshop “Diasporas, Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees from Europe in the Middle East and North Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries” held at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin in July 2025, convened by Alexandros Lamprou (University of the Aegean), Esther Möller (Philipps-Universität Marburg), Rim Naguib (EUME Fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation 2024-26), and Georges Khalil (Forum Transregionale Studien / EUME).

The Middle East and North Africa are connected to Europe and other world regions by infrastructures, politics and the mobility of goods, ideas, images, and people. The selective historiography of these connections, however, is marked by boundaries and uneven power relations and capacities. In recent years, mobility from the South or the East of the Mediterranean northward has been increasingly framed as a concern or problem in European host societies. While there seems to be a consensus among scholars that mobility, migration, and exchange are common and constitutive features of human history everywhere, attention has rarely been paid to the long history of inverse movements of people from Europe southward and eastward, for example to North Africa and the Middle East. As an almost global phenomenon, migration today is certainly not conceived as a concern only in Europe, but also in the Middle East and other regions of the world.

The blog series “Diasporas, Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees from Europe in the Middle East and North Africa” focuses on North-South/East migration – voluntary or forced. We invite scholars to submit contributions that investigate societies, countries and cities in the Middle East and North Africa as spaces of arrival, transit and settlement for migrants and refugees from Europe. While our July 2025 workshop focused on the 19^th and 20^th centuries, for this series we would like to encourage contributions that extend beyond this time frame by up to a century in either direction.

Colonialism, wars, the dissolution of empires, the creation of nation-states and the consolidation of national/regional frames, large-scale atrocities and the displacement of minoritised people, as well as post-war decolonization and nationalization, constitute some of the historical processes and turning points that have connected and divided Europe and the Middle East.

How does the end of empires and the beginning of nation states relate to conditions and questions of diaspora, exile, migration or refuge? What are the ruptures and continuities of colonial and pre/postcolonial structures and politics? What determined the im/mobility of people? What is the evolution or transformation of practices and regimes of migration over time? Against the backdrop of colonialism, nationalist and authoritarian transgressions, economic crises, political upheavals, wars and dreams of a better life, the contributions to this blog series should address migration or flight of people from Europe to the Middle East and North Africa. Contributions may seek to examine the trajectories, biographies, motives and experiences of individuals or communities of exiles, migrants, renegades, displaced persons, the formation of European diasporic, colonial, expat or other identities and communities, questions of integration and assimilation, perhaps also conversion. We are interested in trajectories and routes of mobility and refuge, networks of solidarity and support, negotiations of belonging and citizenship, refugee and migration regimes in the South and East of the Mediterranean. The blog series encourages explorations of the colonial entanglements of population movement and displacement, the impact of mobility on the societies of arrival, the diverse experiences of people from Europe who moved south- or eastwards, and of course questions of accommodation and conviviality as well as their opposites.

Studying population movement of people between Europe and the Middle East, necessitates, as well as facilitates, the interrogation of the formation and contours of geographical/ideological/political constructs and derivative identitary categories. The contributions aim to do so through the vantage point of movement.

This blog series seeks to broaden the conversation on frequently disparate research fields, for example, refugee studies and the rich research on expatriate communities in the Middle East and North Africa, or the historiography on humanitarian organizations and Muslim refugees from East Europe and Russia. Integrating refugees from Europe into the larger question of the transformation of refugee and migration policies in the MENA region promises new insights into the historiography of Europe and the Middle East and North Africa in the modern world.

We thus invite pieces that contribute new insights on migration and mobility of people from Europe to the Middle East and North Africa, and to the very notions of exile, diaspora, and refugeedom.

The series is open to everyone interested in contributing. If you are, please reach out via “eume@trafo-berlin.de”.

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