Global Resettlement Regimes: Ambivalent Lessons learned from the Postwar (1945-1951)

ongoing

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.