Global Resettlement Regimes: Ambivalent Lessons from the Postwar (1945-1951) – Dr Kerstin von Lingen, Vienna
During and after the Second World War, millions of people in Europe and Asia were displaced from their homes. There was nothing new in forced population movement, but in an era of political tensions caused by Cold War rivalries and decolonization, the management of mass migration and the resettlement of millions of people can tell us a global and connected story of a new international order after 1945. Previous historical research has largely focused on the international framework for resettlement, and on the personal experiences of displaced people, but we lack an understanding of the complex practices of resettlement. By using archival as well as digital humanities methods, we shall fill this gap. We shall link the varied experiences of individual actors to the grand story of international humanitarian law, questions of post-imperial state-building, citizenship, and identity formation.
We examine both the failures and the successes, along with the learning processes that helped to produce a global understanding on how to manage mass resettlement. This project will reveal the policies of nation-states and international organizations, as well as highlight the agency of refugees and their own ‘resettlement strategies’.
This project argues that the late 1940s and 1950s saw the construction of global resettlement regimes. Earlier scholarship on displacement and resettlement has generally treated post-war experiences in Europe and in Asia as separate domains. In contrast, this project shows the connections between the European and the Asian spheres, and further links them to Australia and the Americas. This project explores the potential of global history with an innovative interface to legal history, by (a) analysing the role of international organizations and experts linked with the United Nations system (UNRRA and IRO) in formulating policies that had a global impact; (b) analysing the interactions of this global resettlement regime with national policies and regional/local experts; (c) analysing the movements of refugees across national borders and continents, and the role of communities in reshaping refugee lives; (d) focusing on select biographical and intellectual archives and experiences.
The project will use Social GIS methods to map these flows of actors and knowledge, especially through an intensive focus on the International Tracing Service (ITS) / Arolsen archives, which have hitherto seldom been analyzed in global perspective. It will link this empirical corpus with data gleaned from other international, national, and local archives, as well as non-archival sources, such as refugee memoirs and biographies, and representations of refugee resettlement in newspapers and literature. The project will follow these connected strands of enquiry by weaving together four interlinked optics: (a) on normativity; (b) on refugee’s lifeworlds and ‘state of exception’; (c) on global history and spatial studies, esp. the paradigm of ‘carceral geography’, in studying refugee camps; and (d) the emergent field of global intellectual history, and memory studies. The project will publish and convey the ‘lessons learned’ about post-war refugee resettlement which can inform discussions today.
