Who is a Political Exile? Defining a Field of Study for Political Science.
| Author | Y. Shain |
| Published date | 01 October 1988 |
| Date | 01 October 1988 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.1988.tb00659.x |
Who
is
a
Political Exile?
Defining a Field
of
Study
for
Political Science.
Y. SHAIN*
A most superficial examination of major areas of conflict and instability in the world
immediately reveals the importance of political activism of exiles in these conflicts. The
large landscape of examples of political exiles who try to delegitimize and overthrow their
country’s home regime includes famous dramatic historical cases such
as
Mazzini‘s
‘Young Italy’, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Russian exiles in the Stalinist era, the Spanish
Republicans, and the antidictatorial exiles in the Caribbean. Among the contemporary
cases of considerable importance are the activities of the African National Congress
(ANC), Iranian exiles in the pre- and post-Islamic Revolution, anti-Castro Cubans in the
United States, Chileans in the post-Allende period, the exile opposition to the former
Philippine President, Ferdinand Marcos, and the activities of Koreans abroad against
the Chun regime.
Yet to date, among political scientists, there has not been any comprehensive
cross-national analysis to uncover the behavioral and theoretical implications of exile
political activity. Several scholars have tried
to
explain this neglect. Edinger argues that a
general theory of exile politics is an almost impossible mission, for it involves
so
many
uncontrollable variables (Edinger, 1956: ix). Lewis maintains that the lack of data poses
the main obstacle for those wishing
to
theorize about the political activity of exiles
(Lewis, 1968: xii). It may be, however, that both Edinger and Lewis fail to capture
another, and perhaps more basic reason for scholarly indifference to the political activity
of exiles.
While reviewing the existing literature on exiles,
I
began to suspect that one of the
reasons exile political activity has not received political scientists’ attention derives from
fundamental definitional problems. My intuition led me to re-examine the existing
studies on the subject, especially how social and legal scholars define an exile.
Indeed, there
are
different intellectual perspectives regarding who constitutes an exile.
The problem of demarcating the political exile from the refugee, the voluntary
immigrant,
or
the involuntary immigrant has long occupied political and legal agencies,
as well as social scientists’. As one might expect, their definitions reflect their disciplines.
Yet as we shall see, the definitions appropriate in the legal and in the social science
disciplines
do
not address issues germane
to
political science. Consequently, my object is
to launch into a discussion of the different definitional approaches to exiles.
In order
to
clarify this point, and to suggest a definition more useful
to
political
scientists, the remainder of this paper will proceed as follows. In section one, which
*
Department
of
Political Science, Yale University
(U.S.A.).
387
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