E. Kyle Romero – Vanderbilt University

Moving People: Refugee Politics, Foreign Aid, and the Emergence of American Humanitarianism.

Emerging from the Great War relatively unscathed, the United States played a crucial role in the postwar reconstruction of Europe and the Middle East. Historian Julia Irwin categorizes American relief efforts during and after World War I as “unparalleled and unprecedented.” Following the example of scholars like Irwin, Bruno Cabanes, and Michael Barnett, my dissertation focuses on the politics of the post-WWI period in structuring the rise of humanitarianism in global politics over the twentieth century.

These excellent histories of humanitarianism, however, often depict humanitarianism in the shape of static populations receiving aid. My research builds upon these works’ insights by adding the analytical category of movement as a necessity to understanding the work of humanitarians in the interwar years. Huge refugee crises occurred in the wake of World War I and the subsequent wars caused by the breakdown of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. These enormous multi-ethnic empires fractured into smaller sovereign nation-states that sought ethnic homogeneity, often deporting and denaturalizing religious and ethnic minorities by force. Combined with the unprecedented destruction of World War I, millions of people lost their homes and, in some cases, even their national identities. Humanitarian aid in this period, in a sense, was a moving target.

My dissertation revolves around several case studies in the interwar years: the surviving refugees of the Armenian Genocide; the case of “White Russian” refugees fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution; and the legally sanctioned forced expulsion of Greeks and Turks in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War. In each of these cases, American diplomats, aid workers, missionaries, and policy advocates were involved in structuring the refugee flows that came from these conflicts. Americans’ goals were varied: older networks of U.S. missionary communities saw displacement as a prime condition for conversion; American diplomats attempted to manipulate refugee flows away from the United States to prevent immigration; and new technocratic aid workers believed that humanitarianism could nip out the rise of Bolshevism in the bud. Despite their myriad objectives, Americans demonstrated a keen interest in managing global movement beyond the scope of domestic policy. Part of the reason that this history remains relatively unstudied is that before 1948, the U.S. had no official system to organize and resettle refugees coming into the United States. This logic substantiated a prevailing myth that Americans generally were not interested in global refugee movements before the onset of the Cold War. My dissertation, however, moves past resettlement in the United States as the sole criteria for understanding American involvement in global refugee movements. While there may have been no official refugee policy in the United States in the interwar years, that did not preclude a persistent refugee politics

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