By Heather Faulkner
“When you depart for Ithaca, may your road be a long one, full of adventure and full of knowledge.”
The opening lines of Constantine P. Cavafy’s 1911 poem, “Ithaca”, have served as inspiration to the 11 partner institutions,1 working together since 2020 to create new inroads and access points for the study of primary research material on human displacement, past and present.
Funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, UNHCR archives joined the consortium as a partner with the aim of promoting access to previously undocumented archival collections.
The result: more than 21,000 new entries have been added to the UNHCR archives online catalogue – the biggest one-off catalogue data release in UNHCR’s history.
So – what’s new in the UNHCR Archives catalogue?
The UNHCR Central Registry (Fonds UNHCR 11, 1950-1995), the backbone of UNHCR’s recorded knowledge from the early 1950s to the mid 1990s, is now entirely catalogued, whereas previously the available descriptions of the files only extended until 1984. By adding an extra decade to the online Registry catalogue, records relating to some of the most urgent refugee crises in modern history are now more readily accessible for research. Such events include repatriation operations in Central America during the late 1980s, the redrawing of the geopolitical map of Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall, returns to Namibia following independence and responses to refugee movements during the first Gulf War.
The working files of the Division of International Protection (Fonds UNHCR 17/2, 1950s-1990s) were also catalogued as part of the project; a headquarters division which has been responsible for steering UNHCR’s legal mandate to offer protection to refugees, displaced and stateless people, since the creation of the agency in 1951. The files include records on the expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972, the constitution of a Task Force to work on finding solutions for Vietnamese “Boat People” which later became the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese Refugees, and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees in the Americas, as well as the evolution of new protection challenges, including responses to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and beyond.
Information about the contents of the archival collection can now be interrogated through the online search portal, and requested through the research service in Geneva, subject to UNHCR’s Archives Access policy.
Beyond the UNHCR archives reading room, the project has promoted digital accessibility to researchers, with an online platform hosting selected digital content created and unveiled by the eleven partners within the consortium. The ITHACA platform is multilingual, multinational and interdisciplinary, meaning researchers can search for research resources created by partners working in the fields of history, sociology, anthropology, geography and archival practice, with a particular focus on the Mediterranean region. The digital platform is accessible through the ITHACA website (www.ithacahorizon.eu), hosted by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy).
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004539.
- Including the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy), Al Akhawayn University (Morocco), The Institute of Geography (IGAZ) of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (Azerbaijan), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France), Sorbonne University (France), the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece), The University of Milan (Italy), the Archive of Migrant Memory (Italy), Association ARCS Tunisie (Tunisia), UNHCR Archives (Switzerland), The University of Leiden (the Netherlands)