4 November 2021
Over the past few years I have researched and written about the British Occupation of Germany after the Second World War.
More recently, I have become interested in comparing this with examples of occupation in other parts of the world. What can we learn from studying other cases of Military Occupation? Some aspects are very different, but it is surprising how the same themes and issues arise. The answers may be different, but the questions to ask - about the lived experience of occupation, personal relations between occupiers and occupied, the ruling techniques of the occupiers, the memories and legacies of occupation - are often the same.
After publishing the book Transforming Occupation in the Western Zones of Germany, a collection of articles by sixteen international scholars about the British, US and French Zones of occupation in Germany, Dr Camilo Erlichman, Assistant Professor at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, and I have now launched a new Occupation Studies Research Network, which is intended to act as hub for the global community of scholars working on military occupation as a form of alien rule and as a dynamic power relationship between occupiers and occupied.
Over fifty scholars from around the world have joined in the two months since the Network was launched on 1 September this year. If you would like to know more, have a look at the About page on the Network web site and the articles on the Network Blog
Five articles have been published on the blog so far, all of which are well worth reading::
Occupation Studies: A Manifesto by Camilo Erlichman
Second Class Occupiers? by Félix Strecher, PhD Researcher at Maastricht University
Military Government as a System of Rule: Peculiarities and Paradoxes by Dr Peter Stirk, who has recently retired as Senior Lecturer in Government and International Affairs at Durham University
On Horses and Bases: Traces of the American Occupation in Contemporary Germany by Adam Seipp, Professor of History at Texas A&M University, USA
Labour Law, Military Occupation and Industrial Democracy by Rebecca Zahn, Reader in Law at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
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