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“It’s a life”: What it means to be supported as an asylum seeker?

The greeting card in the photo was designed by a young girl whose dream is to continue her interrupted studies in Australia after being forcibly displaced. The Asylum Seekers Centre (ASC) recognised her talent and printed a series of cards and wrapping paper that she designed. These items are for sale online. All profits go towards supporting people seeking asylum in the Greater Sydney community.

This young artist explained her inspiration as follows: “I made some vector illustrations about how the life inside the ASC. It’s one place that ‘make a life’, different people enjoying many activities in their journey to start a new life. I want to add a quote about that in the design like ‘It’s a life’.”

I have the chance to know this young asylum seeker and advise her on study plans and university applications. Her card is a reminder of the resilience and hope of forcibly displaced people arriving in their new country, and that education plays a crucial role in rebuilding their lives.

Veronika Durin-Hornyik, PhD

Pilot project for refugee access to higher education in Australia

This week marks the official launch of the Refugee Student Settlement Pathway by Refugee Education Australia. In the first phase of this pilot project, 20 scholarships will be awarded to refugees selected from applicants in Malaysia, India and Thailand.


The RSSP will provide students with the opportunity to study in fields such as nursing, civil engineering, technology, and business, with support from local campus support groups. Participants will arrive on permanent humanitarian visas, giving them access to domestic student places and HECS, and helping them to rebuild their lives and contribute to the Australian workforce.


I wrote about this pilot project in my article published last July, which has now been approved by the Australian Government and will be implemented in 2025.

Veronika Durin-Hornyik, PhD

Pathways to climate careers for displaced women in Australia

I attended the launch of a pioneering programme yesterday at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, where I’m a visiting fellow researching higher education in the context of forced migration.

JEINA (Justice Inclusion Access) is a pilot project created at UNSW last July, which aims to create an inclusive and connected ecosystem of support for UNSW women students from forced migration backgrounds. When fully implemented, JEINA will be the first programme of its kind in an Australian university.  

To this end, a first partnership was officially launched yesterday between JEINA and Trailblazer for Recycling and Clean Energy to provide pathways to climate careers through scholarships and empowerment initiatives – Enterprise Academic, Higher Degree Research Programme and Work Integrated Learning (WIL) – specifically for women from forced migration backgrounds. These opportunities are designed to provide pathways to leadership, research and practical experience in the climate sector.

Learn more about this event on LinkedIn.

Veronika Durin-Hornyik, PhD

One Run, One Day, One World, One Team of Equals

In solidarity with forcibly displaced people, it was great to take part in the Global Solidarity Run with the Asylum Seekers Centre at Parramatta Park in Sydney on 19 October, organised by Sanctuary Runners in Ireland, in partnership with the Refugee Council of Australia, Amnesty International, the Irish Consulate in Australia and SSI.

I participated in the event with staff members from the Asylum Seekers Centre of Sydney, where I volunteer as a university advisor, helping people with their university and scholarship applications. The photo was taken by Eloisa from the ASC.

Veronika Durin-Hornyik, PhD

Lebanon’s universities during the Israel-Hamas war and the American University of Beirut

The unprecedented attack on southern Israel by the militant Islamist group Hamas on 7 October 2023 triggered the war in the Gaza Strip. Gaza is the smaller of the two Palestinian territories and is ruled by Hamas. In retaliation, Israel attacked Gaza with the declared aim of eradicating Hamas. Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, more than 40,000 people are reported to have been killed: 41,431 Palestinians and 1,706 Israelis. Israel has also been accused of deliberately targeting universities and academics in Gaza as part of a strategy branded “educide”.

In response to the Israeli attack on Gaza, Hezbollah (Lebanese Shia Muslim political party and armed group) fired on Israeli positions, in solidarity with the Palestinians. Since then, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have retaliated with air strikes, tank and artillery fire against Hezbollah positions in Lebanon. Since 20 September 2024, the IDF has carried out hundreds of air strikes in Lebanon as part of a new offensive operation.

More than 560 people have been killed from Israeli bombings in Lebanon since 23 September 2024—including Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah—giving the country its highest daily death toll since the end of the 1975-90 civil war. Among the dead were university students. Abbas Al-Halabi, Lebanon’s caretaker Minister of Education and Higher Education, announced the closure of all state and private universities in southern Lebanon on 23 September, and in the entire country later in the week. The extension of the closure until 6 October was announced last Saturday.

The American University of Beirut (AUB) has suspended all educational activities but has allowed access to its libraries, workspaces, meeting rooms, research labs, and athletic facilities. The Provost’s announcement reads: “The mission of the American University of Beirut is to educate, heal, and serve. Current circumstances have strengthened our resolve to continue to deliver on this mission.

Founded in 1866 as a medical college, AUB is an inter-ethnic and inter-religious academic institution based on the American liberal arts model of higher education. During the Second World War, soldiers of the Polish II Corps—who, after being evacuated from the USSR, crossed the Middle East to defeat the Axis powers in Italy—became acquainted with the AUB. After the war, it inspired them to create an American university in Western Europe to save central and eastern European intelligentsia from the destructive consequences of sovietisation. Joseph Czapski, on behalf of the Polish exile group Kultura, wrote to the American intellectual James Burnham on 23 September 1948:

“(…) This is what gave us the idea for an American University in Europe for displaced youth and for those fleeing from behind the Iron Curtain. Allow me to send you the project. I will not forget the impression I had when I left Soviet Russia and discovered an admirable and exemplary American hospital in Mashhad on the border of Afghanistan, but even more, we admired the American University in Beirut where Arabs, Jews, and Poles could study freely. Remember that Central Europe is moving towards barbarization. All the elites were massacred or deported by either the Germans or Russians, and the youth who are eager to learn only receive an education distorted by Soviet propaganda.”

This American university would become later the Free Europe University in Exile (1951-1958). For further reading on this, here is my article.

Veronika Durin-Hornyik, PhD

How can we preserve the human capital of countries affected by forced migration?

I was delighted to publish a paper on Refugee Research Online (RRO), an Australian research platform dedicated to the study of forced migration. My paper discusses current international policies and ongoing initiatives in Australia to provide refugees and asylum seekers with access to higher education in host countries.

It argues that education is an important tool not only to protect and empower displaced people in host countries, but also to produce future leaders and peace-builders who can play a crucial role in rebuilding their countries of origin. For the same reason, support should also be provided to academic institutions affected by forced migration in conflict zones. This is a burning issue, as the number of people displaced worldwide is increasing. The vast majority of displaced people remain in countries neighbouring their countries of origin. The international community must therefore find global solutions to local problems.


I’m grateful to Sally Baker of the Australian National University for suggesting my paper for RRO and to the editor, Phillipa Bellemore of the University of Melbourne, for the opportunity to publish it as a Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales.

Veronika Durin-Hornyik, PhD

Education at risk in Gaza

Today’s REUTERS article gives an overview of the disastrous situation of education in Gaza, including academics and academic institutions, since the Israel-Hamas war. The article quotes Wesam Amer, Dean of the Faculty of Communication and Languages at Gaza University, as saying: “The challenges of the day after the war aren’t only about the infrastructure, university buildings. It is about the dozens of academics who have been killed in the war and the tough task trying to make up for them or replace them.”

Veronika Durin-Hornyik, PhD

Fabienne Bock (1944-2023): ”A woman who broke down barriers, a citizen against barriers”

With these words, the well-known French historian and feminist activist Michelle Perrot concluded her article dedicated to her colleague and friend, Fabienne Bock. The article, alongside other testimonies, appeared in the December 2023 issue of Raison présente, of which Bock was the main editor, to pay tribute to her memory.

An emeritus professor in contemporary history and historian of French parliamentarism, Fabienne Bock passed away in Paris on 2 November 2023. She was my doctoral supervisor, and I was her last PhD student.

On this day six years ago, I defended my dissertation at the University of Marne-la-Vallée in France and became a Doctor in History. Today, I dedicate this post to the memory of Fabienne Bock. Her career and commitment, her supervision of my research, and our friendship were all sources of inspiration.

Madame Bock—as I always called her, although to her colleagues she was simply Fabienne—began her career as a high school history teacher at the Lycée Jean Macé in Vitry-sur-Seine, in the south-eastern suburbs of Paris. Her career was shaped by the events in May 1968, the most important social movement in France in the 20th century, which began as a spontaneous anti-authoritarian student protest and quickly spread throughout the whole country as an egalitarian effort. Following the riots, in order to reduce the number of students in central Paris, the French government decided to create new universities, including Université Paris 7. Located on the Jussieu campus in the heart of the Rive gauche, Paris 7 was characterised by its multidisciplinary approach based on a tripartite alliance of medicine, science, and literature. Young historians joined the new university and, as it was short of staff, more professors were recruited, including Fabienne Bock.

Soon after her arrival in 1973, Bock and her female colleagues (Michelle Perrot, Pauline Schmitt) launched a course dedicated to women’s history called “Do women have a history?”. According to Michelle Perrot, the brand-new Université Paris 7 was a “fairly leftist and feminist university” and a defender of the MLF (Women’s Liberation Movement, which fought for women’s bodily autonomy and challenged patriarchal society). The institution was involved in the struggle for abortion rights after the Bobigny trial in 1972, which was a milestone in decriminalising abortions in France. Today, this is particularly relevant: on 4 March 2024, France became the first country in the world to explicitly include the right to abortion in its constitution.

The course on women’s history at Jussieu questioned unprecedented issues in French historiography. Michelle Perrot recalls: “What struck me was the silence of women and women in history. They were the great absentees from the historical narrative. Even the great Simone de Beauvoir, the revered author of Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), wrote that women had no history, that all women’s history had been made by men, thus confusing what happened (where women have always been) with the story we tell (where they are not): story and history, as the English say. Activism was not enough. It was necessary to question knowledge and its aporias, as Michel Foucault did about madness and prisons. We had to dismiss the shadows, break the silence, seek out and make women appear. Beyond that, we had to understand the evolution of male-female relations throughout history: a major subject that has almost never been tackled.”

Apart from contributing to opening the discourse on women’s history in France, Bock focused on political history, particularly conflicts and wars, which intersected with economic, personal, legal, and institutional history. She was also interested in the history of the Third World and the former colonies. In 1989, under the supervision of Michelle Perrot, she wrote her thesis for the third cycle (thèse de 3e cycle) on the French pedagogical movement led by Célestin Freinet during the interwar period. In 1998, she defended her doctoral thesis (thèse d’État) under the supervision of the French historian and politician Jean-Noël Jeanneney on the role and functioning of the French Parliament in 1914-1918. Her dissertation, published in French in 2002 (Un parlementarisme de guerre, 1914-1918) made her a specialist in WW1 and a pioneer in French parliamentary history. In recognition of her work, she was one of the speakers at the conference held by the French Senate on 19 June 2014 to commemorate the centenary of WW1.

In 1991, Fabienne Bock joined the newly created University of Marne-la-Vallée (today University Gustave Eiffel), a branch of Paris 7 in the eastern suburbs of Paris, which had been established alongside three other universities in the greater Paris region. She enthusiastically took up the challenge of teaching in an autonomous and innovative way for geographically and sociologically marginalised youth. From 1993, she directed the history major in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department while leading a small group of historians. In 1997, the university was given permanent status. Bock helped set up a small research unit in 2000, which was renamed “Comparative Analysis of Power” (Analyse comparée des pouvoirs) in 2003. Today, this multidisciplinary research unit has 36 members, 26 PhD students, and a number of associate members who share a common research focus on power.

My personal acquaintance with Madame Bock dates back to the spring of 2007. I was in my first year of research for my master’s degree in history, on a fellowship from the Île-de-France French Regional Council. My supervisor was Professor Georges Lomné, a long-time colleague of Bock, who had been her first PhD student at the University of Marne-la-Vallée back in 2002. However, Professor Lomné left for Lima, Peru, to head the French Institute of Andean Studies and asked his colleague to take me on. The first time I met her, she gave me a paper written on the cultural Cold War. Sixteen years later, I still have it with me.

Madame Bock appreciated the research I had begun on the under-researched Free Europe University in Exile. It was an American Cold War asset set up in France in 1951 to provide fellowships for young eastern European refugees and thus to train an intellectual elite in the event that the Soviet regime collapsed behind the Iron Curtain. During my second year of research for my master’s degree, she also invited me to join a research project that she was leading on the petitionary movements addressed to the French Assembly from 1815-1944.

After obtaining my master’s degree in history and settling in Paris at the end of 2009, Madame Bock strongly encouraged me to continue my research. Thanks to her support and a successful presentation before the Scientific Committee of the University of Paris-Est, I became a contractual PhD student in the “Comparative Analysis of Powers” research unit in October 2010. I was also awarded international mobility fellowships by my doctoral school and research unit to conduct research in the US while I presented papers at international conferences. Madame Bock, together with Madame Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, the director of the research unit at the time, supported me in applying for mobility grants and to access libraries and archives around the world.

Over the years, we became very close. Madame Bock knew my French husband and came to Budapest for our wedding. Her wedding gift was a print entitled “Le grand Louvre” (see below), painted by her friend and artist Pascale Hémery. Madame Bock, who was extremely generous, kind, and open, was at the same time very discreet and did not talk much about her private life. She confided to me at the wedding that her late husband was supposedly of Hungarian origins: his name “Caroli” was probably originally “Károlyi”. I knew her house, surrounded by a huge park in Rueil, and when she moved to her apartment on Île Saint Louis in Paris, we lived within walking distance of each other. I will never forget our conversations about politics, history, and research, her rich voice, and the smell of her cigars.

Meanwhile, my personal journey turned out to be more challenging than expected: I had my first child in 2013, I finished my law studies and became a lawyer in Hungary in 2015, and I moved to Munich in Germany in 2016 to follow my expatriate husband. Madame Bock always talked about Berlin and her friends living there, who were the witnesses at her wedding. She planned a visit to Munich, but her health problems and the challenges I faced in settling down and finishing my PhD overruled our plan. “A defended PhD is better than an unfinished one”, Professor Lomné told me with a smile, reminding me of Madame Bock’s motto when I enrolled for the last time. Finally, on 15 March 2018, I defended my doctoral dissertation. In recognition of her unconditional support, I offered Madame Bock a bouquet of roses.

We kept in touch over the following years, and I updated her on my professional activities. In the summer of 2019, I met the French historian François David through Ioana Cirstocea and Ioana Popa, who together ran a research seminar on the history of the Cold War. Professor David was very much interested in my work and suggested that I outline a postdoctoral research plan. This gave me the idea of launching my “University in Exile Research Project” on academics and academic institutions in exile in the 20th-21st centuries. However, personal circumstances postponed devoting myself to research until 2022.

In the summer of 2022, quite unexpectedly, I moved to Australia with my family. My renewed status as an expat, along with my academic background and my own personal commitment have led me to stand up in solidarity with those who have been forced to leave their country. I am currently using my rich experience to help young refugees apply for scholarships and gain access to higher education. I am also working as a researcher on the history of women’s rights under the supervision of Professor Susan Kneebone at the University of Melbourne. Moreover, I have recently been accepted as a Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney where my research is devoted to academics and academic institutions in exile.

Although I couldn’t tell Madame Bock about this new chapter of my life in Australia, I have aligned my professional life with her humanitarian commitment. As she warned in her 2017 article—entitled “A Walled World” and published in Raison présente—we live in a world that is constantly open to the free movement of capital, but not of people, especially refugees, asylum seekers, and those fleeing economic misery. Her impact as a female scholar has had a major influence on my academic achievements, along with Éva Martonyi (PPKE-BTK), Katalin Kadar Lynn (Helena History Press), Marie-Elizabeth Ducreux-Lakits (EHESS), and Susan Kneebone (Melbourne Law School).

Veronika Durin-Hornyik, PhD

What is the connection between Oppenheimer and my PhD research?

This week, I submitted an article to The Exile History Review to explain how the project to create a university for refugee youth, developed by Polish exiles, became a secret US psychological warfare weapon against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

The key person in the story is James Burnham, a prominent American philosopher and writer, who worked secretly for the CIA to outline anticommunist projects. Burnham was well-connected with the US government and military, as well as the American intellectual elite. This enabled him to promote the Polish exiles’ university plan to the highest levels.

What all this has to do with J. Robert Oppenheimer?

In 1947, Oppenheimer became the director of the distinguished Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton University. He was recruited by IAS board president Lewis Strauss. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) features pivotal scenes that took place at the IAS between Strauss, the physicists Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein.

In late 1948, Burnham began promoting the university plan of the Polish exile group in the US. He first addressed the IAS, then headed by Oppenheimer, as evidenced in his letter to Joseph Czapski of Kultura Literary Institute.

Illustration: Courtesy of Kultura Literary Institute, Maisons-Laffitte, France

Refugee access to higher education in Australia

Today is World Refugee Day which falls each year on 20 June to honour refugees around the globe. It was held for the first time on 20 June 2001, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. This rights-based instrument is a cornerstone of international refugee protection and constitutes the legal basis for the access of refugees to education under Article 22.

Since 1998, Refugee Week is held every year around World Refugee Day. Founded in the United Kingdom, many countries joined this growing international movement in 2023 to raise awareness of refugees and asylum seekers through a program of arts, cultural, sports and educational events.

Refugee Week Australia dates back to the 1980s. This year, it hosts engaging discussions on refugees’ access to higher education.  Hon. Prof. Verity Firth, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Social Justice and Inclusion) at the University of Technology Sydney, led a panel session with scholars (Olga Oleinikova, Sally Baker, Tebeje Molla), advocate (Asher Hirst) and refugee student (Amir Ali Jalai Farahani) on Australian universities’ role in the humanitarian crisis. As an outcome of the panel discussion, an article was published to advocate more engagement in Australia following European examples. Another webinar discussed the topic of “Overcoming Barriers to Higher Education for Refugees and People Seeking Asylum”. Hosted by the National Council of Churches Refugee Taskforce, it presented two educational initiatives for refugees: the Deakin CREATE led by Dr Karen Dunwoodie and the Hope-Co-operative run by Sally Morgan. 

Veronika Durin-Hornyik, PhD