Suzan Ilcan
Department of Sociology and Legal Studies,
PAS Building, Room 2063
University of Waterloo,
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
Email: [email protected]
Tel: 519-888-4567 Ext. 31022
Biography:
Suzan Ilcan is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the
University of Waterloo, Canada. Her research includes studies on global governance and
international organizations in the context of humanitarian and development aid, social justice and
citizenship rights, and migrant populations. She is the author of Longing in Belonging: The
Cultural Politics of Settlement (Praeger, 2002) and co-author of Governing the Poor: Exercises
of Poverty Reduction, Practices of Global Aid with Anita Lacey (McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2011) and of Social Justice, Citizenship, and Transnational Struggles with Tanya Basok
(Oxford University Press, 2012). She is also the editor of Mobilities, Knowledge and Social
Justice (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Post-modernism and the
Ethical Subject with Barbara Gabriel (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004) and of
Transgressing Borders with Lynne Phillips (Bergin and Garvey, 1998). In addition to publishing
journal articles and book chapters, as well as editing special journal issues, she is co-editor of the
journal Studies in Social Justice. She is currently writing a new book on the management of
vulnerable populations through work, travel, and migration controls and expert practices
involving international aid organizations.
Rob Aitken
Department of Political Science
10-16 Henry Marshall Tory Building
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2H4
Email: [email protected]
Tel: 780-492-3555
Biography:
Rob Aitken teaches in Political Science at the University of Alberta. His research interests lie at
the intersection of governmentality, cultural studies, and critical traditions in international
political economy. He is the author of Performing Capital: Toward a Cultural Economy of
Popular and Global Finance (MacMillan, 2007). His published work appears in several
journals, including Citizenship Studies, Competition & Change, Consumption Markets &
Culture, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, New Global Studies, New Political
Economy, Review of International Studies, and Security Dialogue. His current research focuses
on the globalization of finance, the culture of everyday economic spaces, and the relationship
between governmentality and the making of economic space.
Abstract:
In building on the scholarship that recognizes the complexity of world order, we emphasize that
emerging notions of world order were connected to postwar planning efforts that involved liberal
conceptions of reconstruction and the management of vulnerable populations. We argue that one
way in which world order was constituted was through a biopolitical orientation, one that takes
‘life’ and ‘population’ as key objects of intervention. This orientation, key to the work of the
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), stimulated diverse practices
in the expansion of an array of expertise, in the initiation of health, shelter, and food procedures
for targeted populations, and in the development of the biopolitical management of these
populations. Our analysis shows that postwar world order was a matter of intervention and of
taking seriously how certain experts, populations, and calculated information entered into its
fields, activities, and projects of reconstruction.
Key words: post war; world order; biopolitical management; United Nations
Postwar World Order and Biopolitical Management:
The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
Suzan Ilcan and Rob Aitken
Introduction
Although world order has often been attached to overly-general accounts of global patterns of
authority, some recent work stresses the contested and historically-specific ways in which world
orders are formed. There is, for example, now a large literature that narrates the formation of
postwar world order which emphasizes the diversity of knowledge and practice that was
implicated in processes of postwar planning. This paper builds upon and extends this work to
emphasize world order as a ‘political mythology’ that has been assembled in particular kinds of
ways. We approach postwar planning genealogically. Rather than viewing postwar planning as
an historical epiphenomenon, we recognize its contingent conditions and conceive of it as an
assemblage, as the product of specific, delimited social and political practices. In this regard, we
foreground one particular moment of postwar planning that involved biopolitics, a liberal mode
of government which takes ‘life’ and ‘population’ as its object. We note in this paper some of the
ways in which biopolitical management efforts were assembled into postwar planning and
constituted certain populations for this world order. To explore the biopolitical management of
population, we pay attention to the ways in which certain populations were conceived and
administered in the work of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
(UNRRA). Drawing on historical and archival research, we argue that the work of UNRRA
orbited around a conception of biopolitical management that involved attempts to care for and
revitalize certain populations as a part of a renewed world order. This work implies, by
extension, the diverse ways in which interwar experts began to ‘imagine global’ as a particular
space of intervention.
The paper is divided into two main sections. The first section establishes the framework
for the paper by assessing the concept of world order and the ways it has often been addressed in
globalization studies. It notes that although world order has been conceived in overly general
terms, there has been a wealth of recent work stressing the contingent and contested ways in
which postwar planning proceeded. The paper builds on and extends these types of analysis in
the second section of the paper by turning to the case of UNRRA which underscores world order
and postwar planning in the biopolitical management of population.
World Order, Postwar Planning, and Biopolitical Management
The concept of world order occupies a prominent location in debates related to postwar planning
and reconstruction. Conceptions of world order are often invoked as a way to diagnose moments
of crisis and transformation. Although notions of world order have been used to assess a range
of historical moments, it is, for Robert Cox, the set of global social relations that emerged by the
end of World War II that most fully correspond to the ambitions of world order (Cox, 1987). As
many researchers have noted, postwar planners were deeply concerned to develop a form of
world order that could avoid the economic, political and geopolitical dilemmas of the interwar
period; a set of commitments that John Ruggie would describe as ‘embedded liberalism’ (1983).
Although conceptions of world order have often been productive, they also risk generating
overly-general accounts that neglect the specificity associated with the reconstruction of world
order or the contested ways in which those processes unfolded. In John Ikenberry’s account, for
example, ‘liberal world order’ is understood as a kind of generalized outcome of American
power in the world. The reconstruction of world order is the function of American hegemony
and, as a result was a process authored by American social forces as they projected themselves
globally. “The United States,” notes Ikenberry, “found itself not just the sponsor and leading
participant in a new liberal international order—it was also owner and operator of it... America
and the Western liberal order became fused into one system” (2009, p. 76).
The temptation to read world order as an overly-generalized formation, however, neglects
the particularities with which novel conceptions of world order emerged. Writing in 1984, for
example, Alker and Biersteker noted the need for historical specificity in the analyses of world
order. Conceptions of world order, they argued, have often been pitched “at such a high level of
abstraction that we are in danger of having thrown out the essential political-economic features
of contemporary world history. The impulse to grand theorizing with timeless and universal
concepts...must be corrected by a greater degree of contextual self-awareness...” (1984, 193).
Greater degrees of contextual awareness allow the making of postwar world order to be told as a
complex story in which the emergence of a global frame for policy and practice was incubated
across a range of fields. Such a framing involved disparate forms of expertise that were slowly
stitched together over a period of time that stretched well into the interwar years.
This need for more complex and contested conceptions of world order has been partly
addressed by critical accounts of world order. For Cox, for example, a cohesive Americancentered world order only emerged out of the political upheavals of the 1930s (Rupert 1995; see
also Plesch, 2008). This is a form of world that, according to Cox, following Gramsci, has deep
roots in a civil society that gradually became global in scope. As Cox insightfully notes, world
order refers to a broad configuration at the global level involving both an integrated political
economy and globalized civil society institutions:
...following World War II, the United States founded ... a world order which was
universal in conception... . It would... give prominence to opportunities for the
forces of civil society to operate on the world scale... . The hegemonic concept of
world order is founded not only upon the regulation of inter-state conflict but also
upon a globally conceived civil society, i.e. a mode of production of global extent
which brings links among social classes of the countries encompassed by it (Cox,
1996, p. 136).
The broad basis for this world order, however, was not automatic, but the outcome of political
struggle and contestation. Stephen Gill, for example, has framed world order as a fundamentally
contested process defined by the complex ways in which ascendant social forces—American
productive capital, state bureaucrats, leadership elements of organized labour—were able to
occupy positions of influence and authority in nascent international institutions (Gill, 2008,
2005; see also: Rupert, 1995; Robinson, 2009). A number of writers following Cox have
recognized that this process involved a configuration of world order governed not only by
economic factors, but also by broader social forces. Matt Davies, for example, has extended
Cox’s reading of world order to include the complexities of cultural hegemony. In Davies’ view,
Gramsci’s notion of culture works against mechanistic or deterministic forms of domination in
which power is seamlessly imposed from a centre onto a mass which is pliable and passive.i
Rather, Gramsci underscores hegemony as a constantly negotiated set of relationships between
dominant and popular forces. “Hegemony,” writes Davies, “even transnational hegemony, is
first and foremost a relationship-not necessarily a stable relationship” (1999, 28). Similarly,
Mark Rupert has also been centrally concerned with expanding the multiplicities at the heart of
world order and hegemony. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s important notion of ‘articulation’, Rupert
sketches hegemonic world orders as contradictory and historically contingent. He foregrounds
the historical specificity with which particular social forces seek to inscribe hegemonic
ambitions. Hegemony is not organized around a singular social force but exists as a historicallyforged, and often internally-contradictory, articulation of different social forces; an ongoing and
fluid process (2000, p. 14).ii
In this paper we build on and extend this complex sense of world order by addressing the
specifically liberal nature of postwar conceptions of reconstruction. By liberalism we refer to a
political rationality that emphasizes individual freedom, mainly the protection of individuals
from arbitrary interference, the rule of law, and market governance. In Dean’s terms, liberalism
involves governing ‘through freedom’ and through a prescribed obligation to limited forms of
intervention. Such a process entails a formal commitment to restricted intervention “made
possible by the liberal form of government as limited by the sphere of civil society external to it
and the liberties of autonomous individuals within that sphere” (2007, p. 199-200). Although
liberal modes of government have prioritized a repertoire of policies related to its self-image of
‘governing less’, including commitments to market self-regulation and the autonomy of civil
society, Dean notes that they have been also, in practice, deeply reliant on illiberalisms of all
sorts; on the imposition of order, authority and coercion.iii
Although many commentators have noted the liberal nature of postwar order (see
Ikenberry, 2009), our analysis attempts to offer a more finely-grained study of one of the
specificities of the kind of liberal modes of government that became central to postwar planning.
We make this case for a more particular analysis—for what Alker and Biersteker refer to as
‘contextual awareness’—because conceptions of postwar order were the outcome of processes of
assemblage. Influenced by Foucault's notion of dispositif, assemblage is a “site at which a
discursive formation intersects with material practices” (Crary, 1990, p. 31). It is both a noun
and a verb, and refers both to the practice of formation (the actual practices through which
something is constituted from diverse materials) as well as the outcome of those processes of
assemblage. As Li has put it, the notion of assemblage foregrounds “the hard work required to
draw heterogeneous elements together, forge connections between them and sustain these
connections in the face of tension. It invites analysis of how the elements of an assemblage
might—or might not—be made to cohere” (2007, p. 264).iv
Assemblage also implies the diversity of sites which hosted nascent reflection on what a
reconstructed world order might look like. As Alison Bashford has emphasized, thinking about
world order during the interwar period was both a complicated but diverse pursuit. For her, the
interwar period was characterized by a range of debates—around health, hygiene, population,
social welfare, and education—all of which became centrally concerned with the prospects and
possibilities for a renewed form of world order. For many experts, these debates also became an
opportunity to sketch out increasingly globalized policy mechanisms. A growing network of
policy makers, specialists, and activists interested in issues as assorted as health, hygiene, and
population, began to reconceive the sphere of policy in relation to the space of world politics
beyond any national (or even international) sphere of action. As she demonstrates, the
globalizing network of activists and experts who debated issues relating to worldwide epidemics,
global poverty, and global population, began to conceive of themselves as constituting an
emergent world order in relation to problems that were global in scope. In these attempts,
Bashford uncovers a set of commitments to world space and to a notion of world order. The
“interwar generation,” she notes, “was already imagining a planet, a global...for these experts,
the bounded territory at issue was often...not national or even colonial space, but ‘the world’, ‘the
globe’, and ‘the Earth’” (2006, p. 83; see also Bashford, 2008, 2007). Postwar planning and
reconstruction constitute one set of the sites at which these commitments—‘imagining global’—
were worked out in a concrete manner.
In this paper we argue that one of the ways in which liberal postwar planning was
constituted–one of its particular surfaces of emergence—was through an assemblage of world
order and biopolitics. Biopolitics relates to a range of liberal ways of governing which take ‘life’
and ‘population’ as key objects of intervention. Biopolitics, notes Lemke, “aims at the
administration and regulation of life processes on the level of populations. It focuses on...legal
subjects that are at the same time living beings... .” (2001, p. 4-5). We argue that biopolitical
management—the range of liberal practices that link the management of life and population—
has resonance to discussions of postwar planning and reconstruction. Liberal modes of
government have often been preoccupied with removing war form life, a self-image deeply
related to liberal commitments to manage and ‘care’ for life (see Reid, 2009). In this sense,
processes of postwar planning—processes designed to ‘rehabilitate’ life again after war—were
preoccupied with biopolitics from the outset. Here, a diversity of expertise relates to the
management of population: domains of health, shelter, food, and resettlement were critical in
directing and shaping the population of displaced persons during and immediately following the
war. These practices and the work of UNRRA situate biopolitical management at the core of
postwar world order.
The building of postwar world order occurred not just through debate and policy at the
levels of the state, but also in the liberal initiatives of UN planning and reconstruction agencies,
in the targeting of key populations for biopolitical management, in the demand for and expansion
of an array of expertise, and in the programs of political think tanks. In short, postwar world
order was not merely a matter of representation; it was also a matter of intervention. By
highlighting this level of practice, the paper offers a contribution to the scholarship that
recognizes the complexity and contested nature of the making of world order. In this regard, our
case study of UNRRA demonstrates an analysis that links world order concerns with the
biopolitical management of population.
UNRRA: Building Relief Expertise and Biopolitical Management
In this section, our analysis focuses on UNRRA’s practices of interwar and postwar planning
which involved efforts to shape, direct, and vitalize particular populations.v These planning
efforts relied upon: expert forms of knowledge to categorize populations; the formation of new
spaces for caring for and managing populations, and; strategies for governing the life of these
populations for various liberal aims and goals. They also involved governmental actors located
within and across states, private sectors, and non-profit organizations, including organizations
whose efforts were influential in fostering postwar world order. As we demonstrate below,
UNRRA played a prominent role in the control of populations and resettlement of displaced
persons due to the war. During its five year existence (1943-1948), it relocated, and managed
millions of personsvi within the occupied territories in Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. It
set up holding camps to care for the health, welfare, and well-being of displaced persons,
fostered the expert training of local personnel in war-torn countries, and aimed to define
approaches to postwar planning, relief, and reconstruction. It specialized in ‘caring’ for
‘displaced persons’ as part of its liberal approach to enhance the life and international welfare of
human populations. Our analysis stresses UNRRA’s relief practices as constituting one form of
politics, biopolitical management, which includes processes to optimize the health and welfare of
populations (see Dean 2010, p. 30, p. 117; Lui 2004, p. 117). In the following analysis, we
demonstrate how UNRRA’s biopolitical activities, together with the expansion of relief expertise,
became linked to the building of postwar world order.
International Welfare and Relief Expertise
In light of severe conditions of famine, the millions of people who had fled or been expelled
from their homes, and compulsory population transfers (Lui, 2002; Reinisch, 2008a, 2008b),
planning for postwar reconstruction had begun just prior to the end of the war and formed part of
the building of postwar world order. Such planning involved Allied operations, such as the InterAllied Committee on Post-War Requirement (1941) which calculated the requirements of the
liberated territories in Europe, and the Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations of
the US Department of State (1942) which oversaw relief work in French North Africa (Reinish,
2007). It also entailed the establishment of the Middle East Supply Centre (MESC) which was
initially set up by the British Government in 1941 and made into a large Anglo-American
paramilitary organization in 1942.
The MESC was charged with the task of controlling and protecting the populations and
economies of Middle Eastern states from “unusual hardship in consequences of the war”
(Hoskins, 1950, p. 85). Such efforts of population control of a region, extending from Turkey to
South Africa and from Cyrenaica to India (Jackson 1986, p. 327), depended on an engineering
expertise that involved: supervising the allocation of supplies and shipping for civilian and Allied
military requirements (DeNovo, 1977, p. 919); encouraging trade between the countries of the
region in order to save imports and shipping space (Smith 1968, p. 7), and; promoting importsubstitution to compensate for a war-time decline in imports of food and other critical goods
(Yousef 2004, p. 93). In an historical lecture, Jackson notes, “MESC achieved the optimum use
of resources in the region and, in so doing, was able to secure a remarkable degree of cooperation from the many governments concerned. It dealt with literally everything in the region:
agriculture, industry, the infrastructure, education, currency, inflation, and so on, and, of course,
health, including safe drinking water and sewerage disposal” (2008, p. 124). Upon its closure
before the end of the war, MESC’s staff and leadership, along with its expertise in the
management of populations, came to form part of the newly established relief and rehabilitation
organization, UNRRA.
Two years before the birth of the United Nations itself, when the term "united nations"
was still used to describe the allies fighting the Axis powers (Black, 1987, p. 3), a formal
agreement had been established to set up UNRRA on 9 November 1943. This agreement
involved representatives from 44 nations which signed what became known as the UNRRA
Agreement.vii The main intention of the Agreement was to finance relief and rehabilitation
supplies and services in those liberated countries that requested help, and to repatriate refugees
and displaced persons who would come under allied control at the end of the war (ArmstrongReid and Murray, 2008, p. 4). Specifically, the key aims of the Agreement were to “plan,
coordinate, administer or arrange for the administration of measures for the relief of victims of
war in any area under the control of any of the United Nations through the provision of food,
fuel, clothing, shelter and other basic necessities, medical and other essential services” (UNRRA
1944). The 10 Articles in the UNRRA Agreement set out the organization’s constitution and
structure which would involve a Council on which each member government was represented, a
Central Committee on which China, the USSR, the UK, and the US were represented, and a
Director General who would serve as the overall administrative officer responsible for UNRRA’s
relief and rehabilitation experts and for a staff of about 30,000 people world-wide (UNRRA,
1944; Reinish, 2007).
The Agreement formed part of the building of postwar world order as it aimed to institute
mutual economic cooperation and assist in rehabilitating war-devastated countries. As such,
UNRRA engaged in the coordination of 23 voluntary agencies, including the Joint Distribution
Committee, the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid
Society. It relied on the services of other organizations, such as the Red Cross, the League of
Nations’ technical organizations, the International Labor Organization, the Intergovernmental
Committee on Refugees, as well as other international, national, and local public and private
organizations of the liberated countries (Weintraub, 1945, p. 6). Its largest financial contributor,
the United States, provided seventy-two percent of UNRRA’s budget, followed by Britain,
Australia, and Canada (Eastes, 2007, p. 29). It should be noted that while the United States’
leaders had not anticipated the extent of social and economic disruption in Europe, UNRRA
came to a close in June 1947 and both the Export-Import Bank and the World Bank were unable
to provide the capital to finance a comprehensive recovery program. At this time negotiations
for a new multilateral trading system were developing (Hogan, 1982, p. 269), including a freetrade based social order in the non-communist world, and later the implementation of the US
Marshall Plan and its ‘successors’, the OECD, European Union, and agencies of the United
Nations (see, for example, Helleiner, 2006; Jaeger, 2008).
UNRRA was the first interwar international organization that was established to deal
with “international welfare” through its relief and rehabilitation assistance activities in Europe,
outside of Germany, largely in Soviet-occupied areas (Frydryskova, 2008). In contributing to
the building of postwar world order, it supplied massive amounts of goods such as food,
clothing, medicine, and fertilizers, contributed to health and socio-political services, and engaged
in large-scale efforts to repatriate displaced persons dispersed around the world. As Black
claims, “Before Europe’s harvests recovered, UNRRA supplies of fats and cereals kept millions
of people alive. Seeds, fertilizers and agricultural machinery arrived to restore food production”
(1987, p. 3). UNRRA was also involved in the renewal of central development and
infrastructural projects, ranging from waterworks, electric power plants and gasworks, to the
restoration of the infrastructure and procurement of materials for renewing educational
institutions (Frydryskova, 2009, 38). Over a period of four years, 24,106,891 tons of supplies
and services, at a cash value at $3,872,749,021, were provided to seventeen recipient nations
(Guptil, 1992, p. 29). At the height of its operations, from 1944 to 1946, UNRRA employed
25,000 people and disbursed $4.5 billion in aid, mostly provided by the United States. These
varied provisions reflected, among other things, a liberal commitment to optimize the wellbeing
and life of populations of war in liberated countries which was fuelled by an array of authorities
and forms of expertise, such as health, medical, nutrition, and welfare specialists.
Through its assessment of a shortage of scientific specialists in war-afflicted countries,
UNRRA sent various Western experts to train local professionals in these countries. It also
introduced programs for enhancing the development of expert knowledge. The UNRRA
Fellowship Program, for example, provided numerous scholarships and enhanced the
development of UNRRA experts. It fostered UNRRA’s relief recipient countries to send
specialists to the USA, Canada, and Great Britain “to learn about the latest advances made by
their colleagues and to implement the experience that they acquired in their home countries”
Frydryšková (2008, p. 39).
The authority of UNRRA and its relief experts enabled the expansion of spheres of
expertise across distances and fostered fields within which its authority could not be easily
challenged.viii The expansion of expert knowledge and specialists in countries devastated by the
war was considered as accelerating the rehabilitation process, and therefore assisting in the
building of the postwar world order. Guided by its various relief experts, UNRRA’s
rehabilitation and relief operations often co-existed alongside of military plans. In early 1945,
for example, UNRRA provided eight teams to work with refugees (instead of the 450 requested)
which obliged the military to divert entire combat divisions to the task (Shepherd, 2008). The
work of UNRRA also conveyed the optimism of its operations, particularly the promise of aiding
freedom and rights and advocating the ‘right’ solutions to the problems of war and suffering.
The Biopolitical Management of Displaced Persons
During the 4 years of its existence, UNRRA provided essential relief and
rehabilitation supplies to about 25 countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa—directly
contributing to the maintenance and preservation of the lives of several hundreds
of millions of people. -Sir Robert Jackson, Historical Lecture (2008, p. 138)
UNRRA’s liberal approach was particularly related to biopolitics and to the construction of
postwar world order that involved caring for the life and well-being of specific populations. On
a broader scale, such a focus on ‘making life live’ is not only part of liberal agendas; it has also
formed, according to Dillon and Reid, part of the logics and imperatives of liberalism and liberal
wars and the various processes involved in stimulating change, social and economic planning,
and the ensembles of power/knowledge relations (Dillon and Reid, 2009, p. 9, p. 43). For these
writers, liberalism has been biopolitical from its inception since it has always revolved around
some understanding of the human as “species being,” with liberal power taking the species as
“its referent object of rule” – biopolitics – and pursuing the project of removing war from the life
of humanity (2009, p. 81-84). And, like any form of power, the biopolitics of liberalism is
multidimensional and can have different styles, spaces, and moments (see Dillon, 2004, p. 42).
While UNRRA was the first interwar international organization to deal with
“international welfare,” it did so through a liberal orientation that was based on a particular
notion of ‘care’. This notion involved matters of life and death, of health and illness, of the
welfare of populations, and other biopolitical processes that would sustain or impede the
optimization of the life of a population. These processes first began shortly after UNRRA’s
establishment when the duties of the Office International d’Hygiene Publique were temporarily
transferred to UNRRA. At the time, UNRRA introduced an Epidemic Control Section and
supported an expert Commission on Quarantine which drafted emergency international sanitary
conventions. In addition to its epidemiological activities, it administered post-graduate
fellowships for medical personnel, supplied large quantities of drugs and chemicals, and
managed certain diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria. It introduced new optimization
missions that were taking place in European and Far East countries (UNESCO, 1948) and
directed to vast and vulnerable populations. It also set up a Central Tracing Bureau to locate
missing, ‘displaced persons’ with the aim of repatriating them, and in some cases, reuniting them
with their families. The Bureau, for example, gathered and recorded information on displaced
persons, including children, and by 1946 it had 5,000,000 cards on file in Germany (Shields and
Bryan, 2002, p. 94).
UNRRA’s notion of care was formulated around international attempts to deal with
specific populations, such as refugees and displaced persons that approached 21 million by the
mid-1940s (see Guptil, 1992:30). The category of ‘displaced persons’ was the organization’s key
focus. This category, we suggest, was introduced as a way to order the large numbers of
uprooted peoples due to the war, such as stateless persons and nationals of non-enemy countries,
and to exclude some people from this category and from receiving assistance from UNRRA. In
particular, UNRRA politicized the population of displaced persons through relations of
citizenship and nationality. A document titled “Eligibility for UNRRA Care” stated that “no
person is ineligible of UNRRA care merely on the grounds of his nationality or stateless status”
(UNRRA, 1947a). It was understood that UNRRA would provide care to specific kinds of
populations based on particular ideas of displacement in relation to notions of citizenship and
nationality. Populations that comprised “stateless” persons, nationals of non-enemy countries
(except those regarded as “German or Austrian citizens or both by the country of their former
nationality and the occupying military authorities in the country where they are now”), and
former residents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (except those of German extraction or regarded
as German citizens) were eligible for UNRRA care if, and only if, they possessed certain
conditions of displacement. These conditions included: that they be “displaced from their former
country or place of origin or former residence by action of the enemy, including discriminatory
legislation, because of race, religion or activities in favour of the United Nations, and that they
were so displaced between the commencement of persecution by the enemy and the end of
hostilities” (UNRRA, 1947a; see also UNRRA, 1947b).
As an integral element of postwar world order and planning, UNRRA facilitated the
control, movement, and well-being of populations of displaced persons by resettling them in
camps or assembly centres. In Europe, for example, UNRRA teams entered Italy in mid-1944
and Germany and Austria in the spring of 1945, and their task involved gathering up displaced
persons from the countryside and relocating them to assembly centres. The assembly centres
ranged from converted barracks or concentration camps to castles. They were sites where
displaced persons were “fed, deloused and vaccinated” (Reinisch, 2008a) and subject to sexual
assaults (UNRRA, 1946c) and armed raids by German police for the illegal possession of food
goods (UNRRA, 1947d). In these ‘spaces of assemblage’, UNRRA’s activities ranged from
health assistance to occupational training, to work and employment planning. These activities
demonstrated not only the belief in the necessity for interwar and postwar planning but also the
liberal goal to improve the well-being, health, and vitality of displaced persons. Other
international associations participated in UNRRA’s promises of aiding the well-being of
displaced persons. In 1944, for example, the World YWCA (Young Women’s Christian
Associations) together with the World Alliance of Young Men’s Christian Associations (YMCAs)
worked with UNRRA in service to displaced persons in Austria. Such work involved the
opening of schools, YWCA-YMCA clubs, and recreation centers, as well as initiating leadership
and vocational training for men, women, and youths (Garner 2004, p. 210-211).
Displaced persons were thought of in terms of population and nationality, terms that were
fused in UNRRA’s biopolitical management of assembly centres and in the broader discourses of
postwar planning and reconstruction. At each assembly centre, UNRRA administrators focussed
on the species body and highlighted the biological processes of these bodies (births, mortality,
levels of health), what Foucault calls the “biopolitics of the population” (1978, p. 139). In
calculating the life of a population, UNRRA officials collected information on the nutritional,
medical, and welfare services available to the population of displaced persons, such as those
related to diet, health, work, and sanitation. In the field of health, for example, these officials
tabulated the total number of births and still births, of pregnant women, of hospital beds used by
displaced persons, of children who died by age, and the specific categories of health personnel
available and the types of diseases treated. In the field of sanitation (UNRRA, n.d.), UNRRA
administrators collected information on what was referred to as the ‘sanitary state’ which
included biopolitical information on the degree of crowding, the facilities available for warmth,
culinary arrangements, refuge disposal, and sick bay arrangements (UNRRA, 1946). It was
through the collection, tabulation, and calculation of these forms of biopolitical information that
the populations could be assembled, inscribed, visualized, and compared. In broader terms, such
biopolitical management efforts sought to render intelligible those domains of liberal government
that are based upon “intelligence concerning those whose well-being it is mandated to enhance”
(Miller and Rose 2008, p. 203).
The biopolitical management of displaced persons, as a population, required authoritative
expertise and data that would distinguish certain features of this population. UNRRA officials
regularly recorded the population of displaced persons by distinct categories: children up to one
year of age; children between the ages of 1 and 6, 6 and 14, and 14 and 18, and; women and men
over the age of 18. Totals were calculated not merely for each category but for each category in
accordance with their nationalities. Records were kept on registered and non-registered
residents, unaccompanied children by age and nationality, the “largest national group”, and the
number of displaced persons employed (UNRRA, 1946a). Here, each life had a value that could
be calculated, compared with other lives, and made to count. As Rose (2009) stresses, the
strategies of calculating the life of a population aimed to identify, manage, or administer that
population.
During the interwar and early postwar period, UNRRA’s relief and rehabilitation efforts
were not neutral but were increasingly implicated in practices that were divisive and highly
political. For UNRRA, the population of displaced persons was indeed the explicit object of
politics. For example, UNRRA strongly encouraged, and sometimes forced, displaced persons to
accept repatriation, such as those in the British zone of Germany. It claimed that “force is only
to be used in the case of war criminals, quislings, and traitors, including certain categories of
Soviet citizens” (United Nations, 1946). A document on Policy Instruction on the Treatment of
Displaced Persons made clear that “the primary object is to encourage as many as possible of the
Displaced persons to accept repatriation” (United Nations, 1946). In executing this policy, it
emphasized that “every effort will be made to preserve, and, where possible, to extend the
cultural, welfare and educational organizations existing for Displaced Persons. Such
organizations will be forbidden to indulge in political activity or to act in such a way as to
discourage repatriation.” In the context of repatriation, UNRRA promoted displaced persons “to
exercise self-government in anticipation of their release” to their national homelands which
resulted in the creation of camp committees, police and fire control patrols, and educational
programmes (see Guptil, 1992, p. 30) that were oriented toward ideas of building postwar world
order.
In situations where repatriation was unlikely, UNRRA considered it imperative for
displaced persons to engage in full-time employment as it was thought more likely for them “to
be accepted as an immigrant in another country than one who has been idle for a long period”.ix
These displaced persons included, for example, those from Poland, the Soviet Union, and the
Baltic states who had refused to be repatriated to areas under Soviet or communist control
(Reinisch, 2007). It was understood that displaced persons would be placed in work “to meet the
direct requirements of the Occupying Power in preference to other forms of employment. The
needs of the timber production programme and of the coal mining industry should be particularly
borne in mind in this respect, as well as the requirements for labour of Services organized by, and
working directly for the Occupying Forces and Military Government” (United Nations 1946, p.
2). Displaced persons were not merely expected to engage in full-time employment but they
were compelled to do so as employment became a condition of their receipt of food ration cards.
This liberal view of population and vitality was stated clearly: “As many Displaced Persons as
possible will be placed in suitable work within the British Zone, if necessary by compulsory
direction. To this end they … will … be required inter alia to register for work at their local
labour office (Arbeitsamt) as a condition for receiving a food ration card” (United Nations 1946,
p. 1). Displaced persons were later obliged to pay for their own food, housing, and maintenance
unless they could prove that they were unable to do (United Nations 1946, p. 2).
Moreover, the accommodation of populations was premised on nationality. In an
UNRRA document entitled “DP Accommodation and Administration,” it was determined that
displaced persons be “concentrated in Camps by Nationalities.” This emphasis on nationality
resulted in the movement of displaced persons from one camp to another. In the case of
Ukrainian displaced persons, for example, they were housed together “irrespective of their claim
to Polish, Russian or Czech citizenship” (UNRRA, 1947c). At this time even when populations
of displaced persons did not wish to be repatriated they were reverted to “the German
population” and that “employment [would] not be accepted as an excuse for non-repatriation”
(UNRRA, 1947c). For other displaced populations who were unlikely to be repatriated, such as
children, UNRRA encouraged them to acquire ‘appropriate’ bodily conduct. At a Displaced
Persons Camp (#701) in the US Zone in Vienna, Austria, displaced children possessing
Esthonian, Latvian, Czechoslovakian and Lithuanian national citizenship received training in
“good table manners” from an UNRRA welfare expert (UNRRA, 1946b). By 1947 UNRRA’s
role in Europe had gradually dissolved; the responsibility for some 643,000 displaced persons
was assumed by the Preparatory Commission for the International Refugee Organization. By
1948 UNRRA closed its remaining offices in Europe, Asia, Australia, and Central and South
America.
The population of displaced persons during the interwar and early postwar period is an
effect, in part, of the biopolitical management practices of UNRRA. These practices produced a
regime of international relations and forms of life made possible inside and outside the state.
These efforts aimed to shape the settlement, and employment of displaced populations for the
building of postwar world order. UNRRA established thousands of camps and created spaces for
populations of displaced persons. In doing so, it operated at the level of the international, that is,
in a multiple and hierarchical space marked by the intervention of cultural, economic, and
political bodies, authoritative schemes, and governmental agencies for a variety of aims (see
Dean 2010, p. 249), including postwar world order.
This section has analyzed one thread of a genealogy of postwar world order that involves
the relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction practices during the interwar and immediate postwar
periods. The analysis highlights the ways in which particular populations are shaped by
international and liberal care orientations, by orientations that are postulated as certainty by
international relief and rehabilitation authorities such as UNRRA. We have argued that UNRRA
was able to initiate health, shelter, food, and resettlement plans through biopolitical management
efforts that aimed to direct and shape the population of displaced persons as part of the building
of postwar world order. UNRRA’s initiatives emphasize the diverse activities connected to
processes of postwar planning and highlight the specifically biopolitical form of liberalism—a
particular style of care—which was key to those processes.x
Conclusion
The emerging practices of postwar planning and reconstruction infused certain sites in which a
particular conception of world order was worked out in various ways. Conventional accounts of
the making of that postwar order—an order that took ‘world space’ seriously in a novel kind of
way—often invoke overly-general accounts. These accounts can imply that a new world order
was accomplished in a relatively straight-forward manner. In this paper, by contrast, we have
emphasized that emerging notions of world order were tied to a series of preoccupations postwar
planners and relief experts had regarding vulnerable populations and how these populations
could be managed and addressed as part of that order. The control and biopolitical management
of these populations were integral to the particular genre of liberalism associated with postwar
world order. As we have demonstrated, UNRRA’s international welfare experts and biopolitical
management efforts during and immediately following the war attempted to shape the progress,
settlement, and well-being of the population of displaced persons in ways that were consistent
with postwar world order. The approach we have taken in this paper emphasizes world order not
as a singular kind of project but as a collection of practices and spaces in and across a variety of
different institutional sites. In short, postwar world order was not merely a matter of
representation; it was also a matter of intervention and of taking seriously how certain experts,
populations, and calculated information entered into the fields, activities, and projects of world
order.
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Endnotes
i
For a useful statement of this debate see the exchange between Randall Germain and
Murk Rupert. See R. Germain and M. Kenny, “Engaging Gramsci: International Relations
Theory and the New Gramscians” Review of International Studies 24:1 (1998): 3-21, and
Rupert’s response in the same volume of RIS.
ii
For the classic statement of Hall’s notion of articulation, see Grossberg (ed), “On
Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues
in Cultural Studies (eds) D. Morley and K-H. Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 131-150.
iii
As Dean notes: “Contemporary liberal rule emerges as a political project linked to the use
of force and violence ... . Authoritarianism is not simply that to which liberalism is implacably
opposed and against which it offers safeguards...” (2007, 200).
iv
Assemblage implies a heterogeneity with and from which objects are formed. As
Endquist notes, it is “the process of bringing disparate practices together” and “it is the ensemble
of those processes” (2008, 376).
v
See Ilcan and Lacey (2011) for a genealogical analysis of UNRRA and poverty reduction
efforts.
vi
The term ‘displaced person’ (DP) was used by the Allies during and after the Second
World War to refer to “civilians outside the national boundaries of their country by reason of the
war” (in Holian 2008, 168).
vii
After 1947, much of UNRRA’s work was transferred to other UN organizations, such as
UNESCO (UNESCO 1948: 5).
viii
See Miller and Rose (2008, 212) for more on such authority.
ix
However, displaced persons in centres or camps who were “unemployable by reason of
age, disease of physical incapacity, [and] their families” would “receive free maintenance and
amenities and continue to live in D.P. Camps” (UNRRA, 1947b).
x
See, for example: Iriye 1997, 27; see also Leland 1946, 295-299.