The Agency of Forced Migrants: Historical Perspectives

This introduction sets out the thematic and methodological framework of a special issue on historical refugee agency in the aftermath of the Second World War. It situates the volume within historiographical debates that move beyond narratives of passive victimization, instead foregrounding how refugees actively shaped their lives and the regimes that sought to govern them. The central question is how forced migrants exercised personal, proxy, and collective agency within severe constraints, and how such practices were connected across geographical and institutional contexts. Methodologically, the introduction highlights strategies for recovering refugee voices from fragmentary sources: reading bureaucratic records against the grain, tracing transnational networks, and identifying how administrative silences can register agency. It also underscores the value of the migration regime framework, intersectionality, and everyday practices in connecting perspectives on structural conditions with those on individual and collective action . In outlining these foundations, the introduction positions the special issue as a historiographical intervention that rethinks refugee history through the lens of agency.