Outsiders Within: Internally Displaced Persons in Early Modern Europe
Short description
This project confronts the early modern legacy of European IDPs. It uncovers the hidden history of these substantial groups who lived in the margins of state formation processes and analyzes how they negotiated belonging and protection with central authorities and local communities. Its main aim is to determine how authorities, communities, and IDPs articulated the responsibility for protection before nation-states and ideas of citizenship were in place.
More about the project
The UN introduced the concept of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the mid-1980s. Since then, the number of IDPs has grown rapidly not only due to mounting internal conflicts in the world —such as Syria, Colombia, Afghanistan—but also because the concept itself has increased their visibility.
Today, IDPs outnumber refugees who cross international borders by a ratio of almost two to one. Whereas the international community has assumed some responsibility for those designated as refugees, IDPs find themselves in the precarious position of being outsiders within: they belong to the state they are in, but are treated by that state as external threats with little recourse to protection.
Struggling to respond to the current exigencies—exacerbated by a lack of historical research on similar occurrences—the UN, NGOs, scholars, and activists call the situation “new” and “unprecedented”: but is it? Or is it only now, when we have started to pinpoint the complexities of the issue, that are we able to grasp its long history?
Purpose and aims
This project confronts the early modern legacy of European IDPs.
It uncovers the hidden history of these substantial groups who lived in the margins of state formation processes, and it analyzes how they negotiated belonging and protection with central authorities and local communities.
Introducing the category of IDPs to early modern refugee studies has
far-reaching consequences well beyond its immediate subject field. Ultimately, the project calls into question the trinity of state/nation/territory that lies at the heart of the present state system. Current responses to “refugee crises” build on the idea of refugee movements as a twentieth-century innovation and in attempting to resolve such crises, oscillate between the goals of repatriation and naturalization/integration, enforcing the idea of nationality and citizenship as the preconditions for rights.
The aim of this project is to determine how authorities, communities, and IDPs articulated the responsibility for protection before nation-states and ideas of citizenship were in place. It interrogates IDPs’ liminal position during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the moment in time when great wars propelled state formation processes forward.
Scholars of present-day IDPs have shown that the question of belonging is central to IDP reception and rejection practices. This project examines under which circumstances early modern states and communities accepted responsibility for IDPs—i.e., received and protected them—or rejected them as outsiders, before acknowledged categories of citizenship were in place.
As its starting point, the project investigates IDP reception and rejection practices in the Baltic Sea area, where many of the leading proponents of early humanitarianism operated. The Great Northern War (1700–1721) cut across confessional differences, with Protestant Denmark and Orthodox Russia fighting against the Protestant Swedish Empire, a composite state encompassing Finland, Estonia, Livonia, Ingria, Kexholm, Karelia, and other territories. The Baltic Sea acted as the Mediterranean of its day as 20,000–30,000 Swedish subjects fled Russian troops first to Finland, then to the Swedish east coast.
The project investigates how these IDPs negotiated belonging in their initial contact and subsequent meetings with recipient communities and authorities. It follows the continued interactions between central authorities, local communities, and IDPs over an additional period of c. twenty years, to determine whether and why IDPs’ status in the communities changed over time. The case study of the Great Northern War will act as a stepping-stone for a broader, in-depth study of IDP reception in European composite states.
To interrogate the ongoing negotiation of belonging and protection, the project examines:
• Central articulations of the responsibility to protect, based on official sources from state authorities (protocols, letters, resolutions) and public discourse on hospitality (newspapers, tractates)
• Local implementations of protective and security measures, based on church and city records (council and diocese records, letters)
• IDPs’ demands and responses, based on petitions
