Yumi Moon’s edited volume, Cold War Refugees (2025), is an exceptional collection of essays on refugee migration in postcolonial Asia. By focusing on the five cases of Vietnam, Taiwan, Korea, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, it demonstrates that the politics of the Cold War caused internal and external displacement throughout South, East, and Southeast Asia. This volume draws our attention to several partitions that followed the end of World War II: in Korea in 1945, in India and Pakistan in 1947, in China (with the political separation between the Republic of China in Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China) in 1949, and in Vietnam in 1954. These partitions, in turn, produced several million refugees, whom various authorities sought to resettle, co-opt, vilify, or ignore.

The volume is organized around the category of a “Cold War refugee.” Not all displaced people in the book would fit the definition of refugee under the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, which established the “well-founded fear of being persecuted” and being outside of the country of nationality as criteria for the designation. As is abundantly clear to many scholars and practitioners, this limited definition fails to protect many displaced people today. Indeed, multiple chapters in the volume break ground in showing that definitions of “refugee” and “displaced person” were contested and manipulated during the Cold War for logistical and propaganda purposes. The editor champions a more expansive definition of refugee, proposed from within the Critical Refugee Studies school, which includes displaced people both inside and outside their country as a result of not only persecution but also colonialism, occupation, and environmental disasters (p. 13). This definition captures the multitude of experiences of Afghan refugees, forcibly relocated Chinese islanders, and displaced Koreans and Vietnamese who lost their homes beyond partition lines.

The book features five chapters, as well as opening and closing essays. In the introduction, Yumi Moon usefully lays out the historical context for the emergence of Cold War refugees: the defeat of the Japanese empire during World War II and mass migrations in its aftermath, when the United States, the Soviet Union, and their regional allies drew up several arbitrary borders. Moon emphasizes that the control of population movements across the new borders was not as tightly regulated in post-war Asia as in Europe. In chapter 1, Phi-Vân Nguyen places the division of Vietnam after the 1954 Geneva Accords into a global genealogy of partitions, including those of Palestine and India. The forced partition of Vietnam was never meant to protect civilians and only exacerbated refugee migration. In chapter 2, Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang shows that Chinese Nationalists and US authorities forced Dachen Islanders to leave their homeland, abandoned to communist rule, and relocate to Taiwan, and then failed to provide opportunities for them to thrive. In chapter 3, Yumi Moon investigates why the US occupation forces in Korea reclassified northern refugees to the south from “displaced persons” to “refugees” after the partition of the country along the 38th parallel, and what attracted northern refugees to militant youth movements. In chapter 4, Ijlal Muzaffar explores the militaristic logic of spatial planning during the Cold War by delving into an urban planning scheme in Korangi, Karachi, where many Afghan refugees settled near refugees of the 1947 partition. In chapter 5, Sabaoun Nasseri and Robert Crews show how, in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of 1979, the Afghan revolutionary government, rebel groups, and international actors all sought to exclude Afghan refugees as political actors. Finally, Aishwary Kumar concludes the volume with a philosophical essay, drawing on insights from W.E.B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, and others. With an eye to the devastating Syrian refugee crisis, he argues that the plight of refugees continues because our societies bought into the imperial and postcolonial logic of drawing inherently artificial lines between segregation within national borders and statelessness beyond them, which are “morally inextricable and legally conjoined” (p. 161).

The volume’s chapters have beautiful conceptual cohesion. The contributions differ in their disciplinary approaches—Muzaffar’s chapter on spatial politics and Kumar’s essay in political philosophy stand out from other social and political history chapters—that complement each other very well, resulting in a “transnational and transimperial approach” (p. 3) to studying Cold War refugees.

Cold War Refugees makes several interventions of note to political scientists and historians alike. The book enriches global refugee studies, which remains a heavily Western-centric field, by focusing on refugee experiences in Asia and, importantly, documenting intra-Asian migrations and how the politics of partition and displacement in one region routinely reverberated elsewhere. The scholarship on the topic can be surprisingly scarce, and even approximate numbers of refugees remain subject to debate, which only highlights the contrast with better-studied refugee displacement in post-war Europe and immigration in the Americas and Australia.

This book also contributes to Cold War studies, which is traditionally the domain of inquiries about diplomacy and security. In contrast, the authors add a human and humanitarian dimension to the field by highlighting the violence that the Cold War had wrought in Asia, and the scars of which are not healed to this day. Most contributors pay particular attention to the agency of refugees. For example, Yang argues that Dachen refugees defied resettlement authorities and ideological narratives of “fleeing communism” and “choosing freedom” that were imposed on them. In contrast, Moon demonstrates that many northern refugees in South Korea channeled their experiences in the north into anti-communist activities and challenged leftist movements in the south. Nasseri and Crews show that Afghan refugees in Pakistani and Iranian camps adopted various political positions, from preaching Islamic unity to criticizing Muslim clerics and mujahideen to calling for the restoration of the monarchy.

The volume’s focus on Asia further enriches our understanding of the Cold War because, as Kumar reminds us, the Cold War was anything but “cold” in Asia. The post-World War II period is remembered by many as an age without direct warfare because the two nuclear superpowers all but guaranteed mutual assured destruction, but that only (and barely) describes the experiences of North America, Europe, and the Soviet Union. Many parts of the decolonizing Global South experienced the Cold War through warfare, famine, and ethnic cleansing. This volume shines, chapter after chapter, when highlighting the displacement that had been actively facilitated by post-World War II bipolarity. The volume focuses on refugees crossing from territories under communist or Soviet-allied rule to capitalist or western-allied territories, and therefore the spotlight here is primarily on the United States and its allies’ decisions to enforce borders, police migration, categorize displaced people, and politicize refugees’ traumatic experiences for Cold War propaganda.

I would like to offer two broad questions to the editor. First, I invite them to elaborate on the broader value of the term “Cold War refugee,” inside and outside Asia, for political scientists and global historians. What are the key criteria and chronological boundaries for this designation? What do we gain and, perhaps provocatively, what do we lose by reifying a category of displaced people based on a specific geopolitical conflict? Second, how do we conceptualize refugee flight attributed to Cold War politics and that resulting from decolonization? Mass displacement outside of Europe, as Kumar rightfully points out, was often a result of “the bloody and botched decolonization overseen by European powers” (p. 166). Decolonization occurred amid the Cold War, and the two are intricately tied together and can hardly be—and probably should not be—disentangled. Does the framing of the Cold War carry the risk of downplaying the actions of local actors, across the political spectrum, when it comes to expelling, accepting, and resettling refugees? In other words, through the focus on refugees, what does this book teach us about the relationship between the Cold War and decolonization?

Cold War Refugees offers a transnational view of displacement in post-World War II Asia and urges us to rethink who refugees were, what their place was in the Cold War, and how their displacement affected state-building throughout the continent to this day. Comparative political scientists, international relations scholars, and migration studies experts should all find valuable insights in this volume.