North American Practices of Forced Displacement, Detention, and Humanitarian Oversight in the 1940s

Nation states abide by international humanitarian law unevenly. They misrepresent their internal operations and deceive monitoring agencies. Yet, they often feel bound to give international agents the opportunity to observe and report, thus facilitating the endeavors they evade. During the Second World War, states notoriously evaded international law to perpetrate atrocities. Even the United States and Canada, whose mistreatment of civilians never generated international alarm, obscured their domestic undertakings from an international gaze. Nevertheless, humanitarian actors gained remarkable access to sites of mass internment and displaced people across the globe. In the decades since, their reports have served as fraught documentation for survivor communities, reflecting the biases of their creators yet capturing rare moments of traumatic pasts. 

This presentation investigates the engagement of the United States and Canada with international humanitarian oversight of detention during the 1940s and its legacy within survivor communities, drawing from international, national, and community archives. 

Delving into one case study, this presentation examines the creation and subsequent recontextualization of humanitarian photography in survivor communities. In doing so, it reveals the making of what Cathy Schlund-Vials calls, in a different case of twentieth-century displacement, a “transnational set of amnesiac politics.” In tracking the journey of these images, this paper situates North American wartime detention within the politics of liberal internationalism and considers what their remembering and forgetting can tell us more broadly about the commemoration and representation of histories of forced displacement.

About the Speaker
Kaitlin Findlay is a doctoral student in the Cornell History Department. Her research examines forced displacement, humanitarianism, liberal internationalism, and memory in the mid-twentieth century. Her dissertation is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. Kaitlin completed her BA in History (Honours) at McGill University and her MA Thesis at the University of Victoria, Canada. She has over seven years of experience in community-engaged and public history, including with the award-winning Landscapes of Injustice project. She has published with McGill-Queen’s University Press and The Canadian Historical Review.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies