The international law defines who are refugees, their rights and the legal obligations of states that receive them. However, the actual formulation and implementation of asylum law are based on politically and historically contingent construction of 'a refugee' determined largely by the nation...

Up until the early 1990s today's Czech and Slovak Republics were countries of emigration rather than immigration. The 19th and the early 20th centuries witnessed large-scale emigrations from Czech and Slovak lands – then still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire – due to primarily economic...