Relief and Rehabilitation for a Postwar World: Humanitarian Intervention and the UNRRA

(Hardback)

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One of the worlds 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.

Reviews

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 UNRRAs 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 *

Author Bio

Samantha K. Knapton is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of East Anglia, UK. Katherine Rossy holds a postdoctoral fellowship at Carleton University, USA.