Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Italian decolonization and refugeedom. Throughout the nearly two decades in which Italian decolonization unfolded, Italian authorities uniformly insisted that Italy could barely absorb its own citizen refugees, let alone those coming from other states. Italian authorities and international actors spent over a decade and a half debating the identity and refugee status of migrants from former Italian lands in Africa and the Balkans. Indeed, these individuals stimulated extensive debate over what it meant to be Italian, to be a refugee, and what sort of Italy would house these national refugees. Using the experiences of Italians repatriated “home” in the wake of decolonization, this book traces both the genesis of the postwar international refugee regime and the consequences of one of its key omissions: the ineligibility from international refugee status and protection of those migrants scholars have labeled “national refugees” or, in contemporary parlance, internally displaced persons.