Europe's Displaced Persons and the Evolution of the Modern Refugee Camp

As many scholars have shown, the management of “displaced persons” in post-World War II Europe was a central element in the emergence of the modern international refugee regime.  The definitions, policies, and practices devised to address the “DP problem” were incorporated into the durable structures of refugee management employed by states and new inter-state agencies such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and thereby exported to the rest of the world. A critical but nonetheless not well-understood component of this process was the use of the refugee camp as a “technique of power” for managing refugee populations. Many scholars take for granted that the modern refugee camp can be traced back to postwar Europe, but to date no one has examined the postwar model or its impact in any depth. This paper will examine the evolution of refugee camps in Europe across the twentieth century. It will focus centrally on the DP camps, but will also look backwards to the interwar period and forwards to the later twentieth century. Among the questions it will address are: Where did the spatial strategies of refugee management employed in postwar Europe come from? What distinguishes the DP camps of the late 1940s and early 1950s from the refugee camps of the World War I era and the camps for “enemy aliens” that proliferated in Europe during the 1930s? How did the memory of the Nazi concentration camps and the new importance of “human rights” influence the development of DP camps? What impact did the spatial strategies elaborated during the DP era have on later techniques of refugee management, in Europe and elsewhere? In particular, what role did the UNHCR play in the further development of the camp model?