Negotiating Resettlement. Negotiations, processes and long-term development of violence-induced migration after World War II.

• Applicant: Dr. Sebastian Huhn
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 428259414

In 2018, more people than ever before were refugees. Relocation and resettlement programs aim to provide many of them with a chance to begin a new life, but programs – such as the EU’s relocation effort – often seem to fail. Why? Understanding the history of forced migration, displacement and ways, solutions were negotiated between refugees or displaced persons (DPs), international organizations and societies in the aftermath of violence-induced mobility provides a most relevant contribution to the understanding of the present situation. After the end of the Second World War, millions of people – survivors of the Shoah and Nazi rule and violence – were displaced all over Europe and had to work out how and where to continue their lives. During the first post-war years, most of those refugees and DPs returned to their former places of living either on their own or with help of the UNRRA. Many of them, however, could not be repatriated or they had good reasons to refuse that option. Against the USSR’s request, the Western Allies founded the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in 1947, to organize the resettlement of the non-repatriated DPs. In addition to resettlement within Europe, the IRO also organized the resettlement of round about 700.000 people in the Americas, in Australia, in member states of the British Commonwealth, in Northern Africa, Asia or Israel. About 100.000 of those DPs were resettled in Latin America.The IRO’s resettlement program has mostly been studied as the history of an international organization and international diplomacy in the context of post-war Europe and the beginning “Cold War”, with a focus on certain ethnic or religious groups, and with emphasis on the hot spots of the resettlement, namely the United States, Canada, Australia, and Israel, that is to say initially Palestine.The project aims to investigate this most extensive historical case of internationally organized resettlement of DPs from the perspective of Historical Migration Research and as a model of dealing with consequences of violence-induced migration. Venezuela as destination of the resettlement will be the case to study.We focus on four cohesive key aspects of negotiation and migration: 1) the political negotiation of the resettlement between the IRO and Venezuela and the spatial and chronological development of the resettlement, 2) the individual negotiation of the emigration between the DPs and the IRO field officers and the DPs’ social profiles, 3) the DPs life courses before and after the resettlement, and 4) the social negotiation about participation and recognition of the DPs in Venezuela and the corresponding discourses about immigration.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants