Panagiotis Karagkounis
Thesis title
“Forced Resettlement, Humanitarianism and the “Logic of Development”: The Greek case and the Near East, 1920s-1950s”
Research Abstract
My doctoral dissertation seeks to examine the role of humanitarianism and forced displacement in wartime and post-war environment in order to demonstrate the entanglement of global and local variations of humanitarianisms with state-building. I propose to focus mostly on Greece and the broader Near East from 1920s to 1940s, an area, which became a frontline of international competitions and transformations during this period.
Despite the establishment of humanitarian history as a fully-fledged field and the thriving literature on civil wars, the regions in the margins of Europe have not been studied enough. The starting point of my story is the mass exodus of populations from the former Ottoman Empire during the 1920s and covers the geopolitical shift in the Southeastern Mediterranean during the emerging Cold War. Even though International History is my main way to investigate this topic, I am also interested in the “voices from below” and the perspectives of suffering populations.