In this volume, I define Cold War refugees as migrants who, either forcibly or voluntarily, left their homelands amid revolutions or wars that unfolded within the bipolar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. This definition does not suggest that Cold War refugees were entirely disconnected from other forms of migration arising within imperial contexts. Rather, their experiences were distinct in that ideological and political dynamics specific to United States–Soviet rivalries shaped both the causes of their displacement and the trajectories of their migration. Because the Cold War was a global conflict, such population displacements extended across continents and invite comparative study among different regional cases. Chronologically, such movements paralleled the Cold War’s rise and decline, subsiding when the superpowers ceased intervening abroad primarily on ideological grounds. With the marketization of Russia and China, global conflicts shifted away from Cold War antagonisms, though their legacies remain visible across Asia. Despite regional variations, the Cold War conflict was a shared catalyst for the mass flight of northern Koreans to the South and for the migration of Vietnamese to the South following the 1954 Geneva Convention. While refugees in East and Southeast Asia were often drawn—voluntarily or coercively—into intense ideological and political struggles, Afghan refugees were persistently framed as apolitical and denied political agency. Because this volume focuses on refugees from Communist regimes, it may appear to carry a conservative bias, as in my own chapter on North Korean refugees and the origins of anti-Communism in postcolonial Korea. Yet the essays collectively maintain a balanced perspective, offering critical reflections on Cold War superpowers while illuminating the historical agency of refugees themselves.

Regarding the reviewer’s second question on decolonization, existing scholarship has generally attributed the refugee crises in twentieth-century Europe to the collapse of multinational and multicultural empires and their replacement by modern nation states. In Asia, decolonization similarly entailed the liberation of colonized peoples from empire and the recovery or creation of sovereign states. Yet, this process occurred under the intensifying pressures of the Cold War.

After the Second World War, the Allies adopted the principle of nationality to manage the movements of displaced populations in both Europe and Asia. In Asia, however, the United States and its allies focused primarily on enumerating and repatriating Japanese civilians in former Japanese-occupied territories. This repatriation, though framed as humanitarian, also dismantled the foundations of the Japanese empire and mitigated potential conflicts between settlers and local populations. The category of Cold War refugees emerged when the US military began interviewing northern Koreans who crossed the 38th parallel amid the North Korean revolution under Soviet occupation. In this context, the notion of ideology or political belief was added to nationality as a criterion to redefine northern Koreans as refugees. The complex cases of Cold War migration in this volume challenge state-centered interpretations of decolonization and call into question the tendency to conflate the establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or the Democratic Republic of Vietnam with the process of decolonization itself. With the onset of the Cold War, decolonization unfolded along divergent ideological trajectories. In some regions, local actors managed to negotiate political compromises among competing groups, while in others, they succumbed to warfare under the pressures of Cold War geopolitics. For this bottom-up perspective, the concept of Cold War refugees serves as an analytical lens for understanding decolonization and reassessing how the Cold War transformed its meaning and course.