The message is adamant: nations decide for themselves and if international ruling is not what the nation likes, then…. “jolly well fxxx off.” So goes the world today. And to be clear, it is a very different world from the one many scholars envisioned only a couple of decades ago.

Ben Gook situates Germany’s present in the context of a longer trajectory of complex East/West relations, citing a “dialectic of remembering and forgetting” (page 15) in which citizens of the GDR were liberated from surveillance from the eastern German state, only to be subject to the control of their memories of that state within a unified Germany.

This book is a powerful portrayal of the everyday lives of resettled refugees, depicting both the forces that act upon them, as well as the strategies they deploy to maneuver the humanitarian and social maze they find themselves in. Accompanied by a wonderful set of photographs, the book lends faces and stories to people whose individual struggles, hopes and histories are so often buried under accounts of refugees as nameless masses.

The images of the body of Aylan Kurdi, who drowned off the coast of Turkey, have shaped global perceptions of refugees and refugee policy in Europe. This is a recording of a symposium which sought to encourage more sustained reflection on the nature and meaning of these images and the ethics and the politics of their use.

Anti-migrant discourse relies on an established notion of who is a migrant and who is not. This is a notion based not on the self-identification of the individuals concerned but on the preconceptions and/or political interests of the commentator. To point this out is not simply to call for academic deconstruction of taken-for-granted ideas.