When considering the wave of forced migrations during the Second World War in Europe and Asia, and the international and institutional responses thereof, we can speak about the 1940s as witnessing the birth of a global refugee resettlement regime. Organisations including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the International Refugee Organization (IRO), and eventually the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) placed refugee resettlement at the heart of constructing the postwar world order. This volume adopts a global optic to investigate the formation of this international resettlement regime in Europe and Asia, while also studying refugee camps and movements, agency of refugees and migrants, decision factors for resettlement, and the intellectual production of people on the move. A historicisation of the global resettlement regime of the long 1940s may well carry important political and ethical lessons for us today, if only to remind us of the connected fates of our common humanity, and the responsibilities we therefore bear towards our fellow human beings.

This article argues that massive human displacement was one of the defining factors in China's immediate postwar period (1945–49). It shows that at least three distinctive groups were dispersed during the wartime years and needed to be resettled after the war ended in August 1945: civilian refugees, administrators who had been relocated to the temporary capital at Chongqing, and troops transferred in anticipation of an upcoming civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. The article argues that China's new sovereign status in 1945 was paradoxically a source of weakness when it came to resettlement and reconstruction, as China sought international funds to undertake its own reconstruction, but could not demit responsibility to an external actor to organise matters as the United States did for western Europe. A growing sense of anomie and unsettlement prevented resettlement and China remained a zone in which international and domestic conflict came together. Both sets of factors shaped the dislocation that destroyed the possibilities of a stable resettlement in China after the great displacement of wartime.

Between 1947 and early 1952, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which was established within the framework of the United Nations to “solve” the so-called European refugee problem after the end of the Second World War, resettled one million European refugees—victims of Nazism as well as East European refugees who escaped the Red Army—all over the world. The IRO's resettlement project is regarded as a blueprint for the establishment of the postwar international migration regime, and it was the predecessor of later initiatives such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

In this article I argue that the IRO's history as well as the history of the migration regime after the Second World War has, thus far, mainly been written from the perspective of U.S. American and European history. Northern nations are considered agents in this history, while southern countries are considered as passive “destinations.” In the case of Venezuela, the article argues that the Global South's active role in the migration regime must be taken into consideration to understand postwar migration. From the perspective of a connective approach to global history, it shows how Venezuela, as a political agent, was involved in shaping the migration regime; how it perceived itself as an agent within that regime; and how it intervened on a small scale to shape its form and function.

At the end of the Second World War, millions of men, women, and children shared a similar experience: delousing, at the hands of Allied armies and relief agencies, to prevent the spread of infectious disease. The procedure lasted seconds. In studies of displaced populations in this period, its effects upon them are commonly presented as invasive, humiliating, and, for some, reminiscent of Nazi abuse. Adopting a wider lens, this article explores how events and developments in a global range of settings shaped demands for effective delousing as well as the character of measures devised to achieve it. Harnessing fresh perspectives on how delousing was managed, delivered, and experienced, the article also advances understanding of how refugees responded to it.

There are still many historical blind spots in research on Europe's displaced persons (DPs) after the Second World War. In particular, there are relatively few studies that link microhistorical perspectives on repatriation and resettlement with global contexts. This essay addresses this gap, in empirical as well as methodological terms, by focusing on a group of DPs that hitherto has received little attention from scholars: former members of the Royal Yugoslav Army, whom the Nazis had taken to Germany as prisoners of war (POWs). Classified as DPs after 1945, they lived in camps administered by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the International Refugee Organization (IRO). Under the circumstances, they continued to maintain military-like routines and fiercely refused repatriation. This was partly an expression of loyalty to the exiled Yugoslav king, Peter II. But it also mirrored the fears of DPs about—and resistance to the idea of—being returned to their homeland in the context of the early Cold War. Using the example of a DP camp in Bad Aibling (Upper Bavaria), this article connects Yugoslav DPs, Allied DP politics, and the interests of Tito's government, as well as the interventions of international relief agencies. It shows how some DPs adroitly subverted the international logic of DP self-governance as promoted by UNRRA. A global microhistory approach thus reveals how local actors and sites are shaped by, but also foundationally constitutive of, global regimes of migrational self-governance.

Forced migration as a reaction to National Socialism represents individual as well as simultaneously collective, transnational, and global experiences. Not only identity-forming categories but also forms of knowledge are profoundly reshaped by processes of displacement and resettlement. The paper argues that the biography of the archaeologist Grete Mostny (1914–91) offers an exemplary case study of such processes of adaptation on individual, collective, and academic levels. Due to her escape from Austria to Chile as a persecuted Jew in 1938/39, Mostny's identity as a white European (female) scholar attained a whole new significance and became the door opener for her interdisciplinary career at the interface of archaeology and anthropology in her new homeland. Her research in Chile was a product of a global event—namely mass forced emigration from Europe—as well as of factors on the micro level, such as her European descent and her academic education, which gave her certain privileges in her new environment. When Mostny arrived in Chile in 1939, a new European and U.S. hegemony had already begun to dominate academia in the country, which was trying to modernise itself and move from the academic periphery closer to the centre. Mostny, the once racially persecuted scholar, fit well in this process by making use of her “European” knowledge and her networks. In 1954 she received international attention when she put together a pioneering interdisciplinary research team to study El Niño del Cerro El Plomo, a four-hundred-year-old Inca mummy found in the Andes five thousand metres above sea level. Nationally, Mostny's study contributed, beyond all measure, to the Andean state's identity, as it re-evaluated and enhanced Chile's prehistory. In a time of political and social tensions in Chile, the rediscovery of its Indigenous prehistory—even by a foreign white scholar—helped to overcome the old shadows of colonial historical research, perhaps because in the immediate present the Indigenous movement in Chile offered little potential for consensus. This article uses Mostny's transnational biography as a lens through which to detect these connected histories and entangled hegemonies in the fields of anthropology and archaeology, which have become instrumental in the formation of Chile's national identity. Moreover, the paper shows that the category of race played a central role in the field of knowledge production and career development, not only for Grete Mostny.

This essay advocates “refugee political thought” as an autonomous category which needs to be centre-staged in global intellectual history. I concretise this by studying Bengali Hindu refugees who migrated from Muslim-majority eastern Bengal (after the Partition of British India in 1947 part of Pakistan, and after 1971, the sovereign state of Bangladesh) to the Hindu-majority Indian state of West Bengal, and occasionally their descendants as well. By studying the transnational horizons of Bengali refugees from the late 1940s to today, I posit them as part of modern global intellectual history. Bengali refugees and their descendants connected their experiences with those of refugees elsewhere in the world, seeing themselves, for example, as “new Jews.” Later, some of them aligned themselves with the Palestinian cause. Refugee politics became enmeshed with Cold War revolutionary currents. European, Soviet, and Chinese Marxist theory—and latent Lockean assumptions—propelled the everyday politics of refugee land occupation. Marxism, sometimes with Hegelian inflection, nourished the East Bengali-–origin founders of Subaltern Studies theory and Dalit (lower-caste) thought. Ultimately, this essay shows how Bengali refugees instrumentalised transnational thinking to produce new models of democratic political thought and practice in postcolonial India. I describe this as “refugee democracy.”