One of the world’s first truly international humanitarian organisations, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was championed as a beacon of postwar philanthropy that sought to rehabilitate as well as provide relief. This edited volume offers the first comprehensive study of the UNRRA and seeks to identify the key successes, limitations and enduring challenges it faced in the postwar period.
Tracing the rehabilitation of displaced children in the camps of Germany and Austria, to mountainous Greek villages without access to food or medical supplies and refugees in postwar China, it will assess the immediate impact of UNRRA rehabilitation policy on postwar reconstruction, international development and broader humanitarian processes. Through these international case studies it will explore the ways in which a fundamental inability to define ‘rehabilitation’ made it seemingly impossible to meet its objectives.
As a predecessor to modern specialised agencies such as UNESCO, WHO and UNICEF, studying the UNRRA is crucial for our understanding of the history of the United Nations, the circumstances that shaped its future policies and the foundations of modern humanitarianism.
Introduction: Beyond Relief and Rehabilitation: UNRRA in Historical Perspective, Samantha K Knapton (University of Nottingham, UK); Katherine Rossy (Royal Military College of Canada) 1. ‘UNRRA – You Never Really Rehabilitate Anyone’: Problems of Rehabilitation in Definition and Practice, Samantha K Knapton (University of Nottingham, UK) 2. ‘Low in Health and Spirits’: The Hygiene and Health Campaign in UNRRA Camps in Germany and Austria as a Form of Rehabilitation, Katarzyna Nowak (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Austria) 3. Paving the way for a new democracy? UNRRA in Italy, Silvia Salvatici (University of Florence, Italy) 4. The Muse of Rural Assistance in Greece for Relief and Rehabilitation: The Near East Foundation and United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, 1944-47, Joshua Thew (The Graduate Institute Geneva, Switzerland) 5. Relief and Rehabilitation in UNRRA/CNRRA Photographic Representations of Refugees in Post-war China, Caroline Reeves (Harvard University Fairbank Centre, USA) 6. The Forgotten ‘R’: UNRRA’s Central Tracing Bureau and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Post-war Germany, 1945-47, Katherine Rossy (Royal Military College of Canada) 7. The Pate Reports and UNRRA: The Beginning of UNICEF, 1946, Lisa Payne Ossian (Des Moines Community College, USA) 8. The UNRRA: the ambiguity of ‘rehabilitation’, suppressed discourses, and unlearned lessons from FDR’s post-war assistance operation, Dan Plesch and Grace Schneider (SOAS, University of London, UK) Afterword: UNRRA: An Overview, Peter Gatrell (University of Manchester, UK)
Samantha K. Knapton is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nottingham, UK. Katherine Rossy is an Assistant Professor of International History at the Royal Military College of Canada.
Reviews for Relief and Rehabilitation for a Post-war World: Humanitarian Intervention and the UNRRA
A very fine collection of articles around the Rehabilitation mandate of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, this collection help cast a new light on the largest humanitarian enterprise to follow a world war to date. * Bertrand Taithe, University of Manchester, UK * Relief and Rehabilitation for a Postwar World asks us to recognize the formative role of UNRRA in the genesis of modern international aid agencies. Using a series of case studies of UNRRA’s operations around the globe, it challenges us to rethink the shift in the nature of aid from simple relief to include rehabilitation, however ill-understood. * Lynne Taylor, Associate Professor, University of Waterloo, Canada *
