23. Juni 2023
17:00 Uhr
Großen Festsaal der Universität Wien
Anlässlich des Auftakts des ERC Advanced Grant-Projekts "GLORE" zu „Displacement and Resettlement" in Europa und Asien nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg findet am 23. Juni 2023 um 17 Uhr eine Keynote Lecture von Jessica Reinisch, Direktorin des Birkbeck's Centre for the Study of Internationalism in London, im Großen Festsaal der Universität Wien statt.
Begrüßung durch Dekanin Christina Lutter und Einführung durch Projektleiterin Kerstin von Lingen, anschließend laden wir zum Empfang im Arkadenhof.
Bitte registrieren Sie sich bei szilvia.steiner@univie.ac.at , vielen Dank.
Lecture: 'Auntie UNRRA', or UNRRA, the super-state
Writing histories of displacement and resettlement, and drawing lessons from them, requires a sense of chronologies and change over time. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was not primarily created as a refugee agency, but existed as an organisation in a long line of largely piecemeal and provisional bodies, instruments and mechanisms tackling population and refugee questions. In this talk I would like to think about UNRRA's place in the history of efforts to 'manage' refugees. By some criteria, UNRRA fits neatly into a lineage of organisations that stretches from the first Nansen office to the UNHCR. But in significant ways UNRRA's approach was different from earlier and later programmes. UNRRA's overall significance lay in its uniquely 'connected' approach, which emphasised that broken infrastructures, economic and agricultural underdevelopment, lack of expert knowledge, and mass displacement were all part of the same set of problems highlighted and magnified by war. With the end of UNRRA, a self-consciously multilateral approach was replaced by arrangements that were significantly narrower in scope, vision and extent of political support.
Speaker: Jessica Reinisch is Professor of Modern European History at Birkbeck, University of London. She is Director of Birkbeck's Centre for the Study of Internationalism and editor of a book series, Histories of Internationalism, published by Bloomsbury. She has a long-standing research interest in UNRRA, alongside interests in war and post-war reconstruction, migration and displacement, internationalism, and, most recently, the history of international conferences.
