Legal Responses to Minority Rights in Post-Conflict Societies

This session examines how political upheavals reshape the rights and recognition of minorities. By tracing how states, international organizations, and revolutionary leaders redefine who counts as a protected subject, the two papers show how marginalized groups invoke and contest legal categories to secure mobility, political voice, and substantive equality.
Paper Abstracts:

Jewish Refugees in the Age of the Jewish Nation: Soviet Jews as "Cold War Refugees" or "Israeli Repatriates" 1971-1991Alexandra (Sasha) Zborovsky
In 1951 members of the United Nations gathered to draft the modern definition of “refugee.” There they distinguished Jewish survivors of the Holocaust as the ultimate archetype. But as the Cold War intensified, the term “refugee” expanded to include millions of new victims of displacement, ranging from Hungarian to Indochinese migrants. By the 1970s, as hundreds of thousands of the Soviet Union’s Jewish citizens—targets of de facto antisemitism—began emigrating from the world’s first socialist state, the world was once again forced to contend with Jews as refugees. In the decades to follow, European states and Jewish philanthropic agencies administrated the departure of over one million Jews from the USSR, many of whom were denaturalized by the Soviet state. This time, however, Western humanitarian organizations found themselves at odds with Israeli diplomats and Jewish nationalists. An agreement could not be reached: with the existence of a Jewish nation, could a Jew be a refugee? Few dared argue that Soviet Jews met the criteria of demonstrating a “well-founded fear of persecution.” It was the issue of statelessness that sowed discord. While the Israeli government argued that all stateless Soviet Jews were automatically Israeli citizens and did not qualify as refugees, Western states and NGOs campaigned for a freedom of movement that rejected this model of national repatriation. My work reveals not only how states and world leaders manipulated concepts of citizenship, refugeehood, and repatriation in order to direct and control the mobility of Soviet Jews, but how Soviet Jews also engaged these terms to retain agency over their transit and resettlement processes. Their experiences unveil the inherent contradictions of refugeehood. Designed to augment individual human rights, the political category remained tethered to the nation-state.

Between Elite Strategy and Mass Mobilization: Women’s Political Empowerment in Anti-Colonial Social Revolutions
Johanna Reyes Ortega
Why do some social revolutions advance women’s rights while others do not? Although scholars agree that conflict can open windows of opportunity for gender equality, existing explanations overlook how the type of revolution shapes these outcomes. I argue that anticolonial social revolutions are more likely to expand women’s rights than revolutions aimed solely at domestic redistribution or regime change. Because anticolonial struggles require broad-based mobilization against a foreign power, revolutionary leaders must articulate inclusive visions of liberation that transcend class and gender divisions. These ideological appeals become institutionalized through mass organizations that link women to the new state, embedding equality within the regime’s legitimacy and state-building project. By contrast, revolutions confronting domestic elites can rely on narrower, class-based coalitions and pragmatic appeals, resulting in symbolic rather than substantive gender reforms. Consistent with this theory, cross-national evidence since 1900 shows that women’s political empowerment increases most sharply following social anticolonial revolutions. A complementary case study of the 1959 Cuban Revolution demonstrates how the regime expanded women’s citizenship to consolidate revolutionary authority—equating women’s liberation with the revolution’s success and suppressing resistance to egalitarian reform. The findings underscore how bottom-up mobilization can generate new channels of accountability and democratic bargaining, even under authoritarian regimes.

Speaker bios:
Alexandra (Sasha) Zborovsky is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania and a Visiting Instructor at Bryn Mawr College. She is a historian of the former Soviet Union with a focus on Jewish experience and twentieth century mobility regimes. Her work has been supported by the Association for Slavic East European and Euriasian Studies, the Center for Jewish History, and Penn's Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration. Her research investigates the departure of more than one million Jews from the former Soviet Union throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century and the diplomatic, ideological, and social circumstances at the foundation of this great emigration.
Johanna Reyes Ortega is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on comparative politics, gender, and the political economy of development. Her research examines the long-term effects of conflict and social movements on gender dynamics in Latin America, with a focus on Mexico, Cuba, and Central America. In her dissertation, she examines the determinants of gender inequality in post-WWII revolutionary contexts. Her work applies mixed causal inference and machine learning methods that employ large-scale administrative, survey, and archival data.

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