Gender and the Experience of Humanitarianism in Austria-Hungary’s Refugee Camps during the First World War

• In Event: East Central Europe as a Refuge in the 20th Century

Abstract

During the First World War, multiple invasions in the Eastern and the Southern parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire generated waves of mass displacement. At the same time, the government, in collaboration with the military, developed a program of formal evacuation of civilians living in and around the main war zones. By the formal end of the war, Austria-Hungary saw over one million internally displaced civilians. In this context, state authorities developed a network of refugee camps designed to contain this heightened mobility and which became the crux of wartime governance of mass displacement. At the same time, this refugee encampment entailed the gradual meshing of emergency containment with professionalized, largely state-produced humanitarian assistance. This presentation looks at the case of refugee women, as they emerged as one of the social categories at the heart of the humanitarian landscape in the period. In this context, it explores how refugee women became quintessential objects of state assistance in camps. Conversely, it analyzes how displaced women experienced and shaped trajectories of humanitarianism in these arguably gendered spaces of refugeedom.

Author

• Doina Anca Cretu, University of Warwick (UK)