Being in Transit

International Conference | ERC „GLORE. Global Refugee Regimes” |25 – 27 May 2025

World War II and its immediate aftermath saw an unprecedented scale of population movement across the globe. Managing population flows thus became a core function of the successively emerging international organisations, UNRRA and IRO. For most wartime migrants in Asia, Europe, and the Pacific, being in transit was a key feature of their post-war experience. It often meant months, or even years of immobility and uncertainty. Collective identifications, too, were being reconstructed within and outside camps. Categorised as displaced persons (DPs), some sought to assert their nations’ place on the political map of the postwar world, and some learned to reinvent group and individual identities to negotiate better futures. While refugees were in a state of transition, the world around them was also unstable. Not only the German Nazi Reich and the Greater Japanese empire had collapsed, but returning European imperial powers found the old world gone; the civil war in China resumed and foreshadowed violences in the widely decolonising world, and the unfolding global Cold War further redraw the political map. These changes profoundly shaped individuals’ post-war experiences of being in transit, and sometimes created opportunities. The papers presented by renown international scholars at the conference offer insights into vastly different yet often contemporaneous forms of “Being in Transit” around 1945. They analyse the spaces, networks and continuities of transit, ranging from specific localities to international trajectories along which people and ideas could travel, discussing refugeedom in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa, and Oceania. The papers discuss the agency of actors, groups, and organisations to shape the sights and structures of transit, to flourish in them, or to use them for their ends. They use a variety of sources, including oral history interviews, organisational files, and local and national-level governmental sources, to investigate the temporality of these histories, their dynamics and specific momentum in world that was itself constantly in transition.

 Please register at glore.zeitgeschichte@univie.ac.at

You can download the programme flyer here