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

Project funded by the German Research Foundation - DFG (01/ 2020 - 09/ 2023)

After the end of the Second World War, millions of people - survivors of the Shoah and Nazi rule and violence, East European refugees, former Spanish Republican soldiers, and many others - 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 United Nations founded the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in 1946/1947, to organize the resettlement of the non-repatriated DPs. In addition to resettlement within Europe, the IRO also organized the resettlement of round about one million 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 project investigates this 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 on the case of the resettlement in Venezuela.

Latest Project Publications

Huhn, Sebastian: Rethinking the Post-War International Migration Regime from the Global South: Venezuela in a Global History of White Immigration, in: Itinerario 46:2 (2022), pp. 214-232.  (Full text)

Huhn, Sebastian: Negotiating Forced Migration in the IRO's 'Care and Maintenance' (CM/1) Files. One Setting, Three Underlying Aims, (at Least) Four Actors, and Multiple Forms of Human Agency. IMIS Working Paper 12, Osnabrück: IMIS, 2021  (link).

Huhn, Sebastian: Negotiating Resettlement in Venezuela after World War II: An Exploration, in: Historical Social Research, 45. 2020, No. 4, pp. 203-225 ( link).

Hennies, Lukas / Huhn, Sebastian / Rass, Christoph: Gewaltinduzierte Mobilität und ihre Folgen: "Displaced Persons" in Osnabrück und die Flüchtlingskrise nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, in: Osnabrücker Mitteilungen, 123. 2018, pp. 183-232 ( link).

Huhn, Sebastian/ Rass, Christoph: The Post-World War II Resettlement of European Refugees in Venezuela: a Twofold Translation of Migration, in: Pisarz-Ramirez, Gabriele/ Warnecke-Berger, Hannes (eds.): Spatialization Processes in the Americas. Configurations and Narratives, Bern: 2018.

Blog Posts

June 30, 1947, the birth of the modern refugee regime, June 2022 (link).

An almost forgotten chapter of German post-war history. The "Law on the Legal Status of Homeless Foreigners in the Federal Territory", May 2021 ( link).

'Populate or Perish'. On the interests of Australia and Venezuela in the negotiations of the Geneva Refugee Convention, April 2021 ( link).

Eurocentrism and strategic interests in the production of knowledge about migration in the 1940s and 1950s, April 2021 (link).

Negotiating Resettlement - On the Negotiation of Mobility Opportunities after the Second World War, February 2021 ( link).

Forthcoming

(with Christoph Rass & Lukas Hennies): On the Local Translation of Global Migration Policy in the Migration Regime of the International Refugee Organization after the Second World War.