Multi-actor Synergies, Sovereignty, and Refugee Resettlement in Interwar Greece

Abstract

The colossal task of resettling over one million refugees in interwar Greece involved—in addition to multiple domestic actors—various foreign state, non-state, and private business agents, as well as the League of Nations and the Refugee Settlement Commission established under its auspices. Refugee resettlement had already been associated with the consolidation of the state’s fragile sovereignty in the recently acquired northern provinces. The sovereign prerogatives of Greece, restricted ever since the state’s establishment, were in a kind of limbo in the years following the Asia Minor Catastrophe. During these years, governance powers beyond the Greek state, most importantly the Refugee Settlement Commission, in collaboration with decision-making centers within Greece, temporarily assumed many of the functions a sovereign state was expected to carry out. These powers, working jointly with Greek actors, aided in refugee resettlement while simultaneously contributing to the territorialization of state power and its institutional and infrastructural consolidation in the “New Lands.”