Image Credits: Collage of images from the ICRC Audiovisual Archives. The photos depict scenes of civilians in Japanese internment camps in Batavia (Djakarta) and Makasser, Indonesia, during World War II. © ICRC Archives (ARR).

International Conference: "War, Trade and the Divisive Power of Citizenship"

Divisive Power of Citizenship, one of our Institute’s SNSF-funded project, concluded this year with its closing international conference on 22/23 September 2022 in Basel, Switzerland. The event offered a broad platform for debate about citizenship in a global context, addressing scholars working in the fields of Global History, Asian Studies, International Law and Digital Humanities, at a time of terrifying topicality.

The central themes of discussion were expat communities in Asia, and civil internment camps during the Second World War in Asia, which had previously been rarely studied. An additional methodological component investigated the potential of digital methods in this field, which analysed the impact of access to precise data at scale relating to networks of foreign residents—addressing interferences with citizenship, statelessness and denaturalisation. The conference also saw the launch of new data resources which were created during the course of the project, covering Foreign Residents in East Asia between 1863 and 1941.

The individual panels promoted interdisciplinary exchange across disciplinary borders. Panel I on foreigner status focused on Expats, imperialists and victims: Citizenship during Transformation Periods; Panel II discussed sharing of primary sources and secure data preservation; Panel III addressed research into civilian internment camp records and introduced next-generation digital resources for historians; Panel IV investigated legal frameworks protecting civilians, with reference to their citizenship in relation to military conflict (e.g. enemy aliens).


Conference Program

Venue: Aula of the Natural History Museum Basel, Augustinergasse 2, 4051 Basel 

16:00 – 17:15Keynote
Daniel Kipfer Fasciati
17:15 – 17:45Launch
FAIR Data Resources for Research in Global History

Venue: Institute for European Global Studies, Riehenstrasse 154, 4058 Basel 

9:00 – 9:30Morning Coffee
10:00 – 12:00Panel I
Foreigners: Expats, Imperialists and Victims. Citizenship in Transformation Periods

Chair: Madeleine Herren-Oesch (University of Basel)
Discussant: Thomas David (University of Lausanne)

Citizenship in the Transformation of the Imperial/Colonial Border to the National Border
Tomoko Akami (Australian National University, Canberra)

Citizenship and Anticolonial Nationalism in the Interwar French Empire
Michael Goebel (Free University of Berlin)

Citizenship’s Time: The Institution of Citizenship in Times of Crisis
Teresa Pullano (University of Basel)
10:00 – 12:00

Panel II
Access to Civilian Internment Camps: Next-Generation Digital Resources for Historians

Chair:Peter Cornwell (Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster)
Discussant: Martin Grandjean (University of Lausanne)

Hybrid Workflows for Extraction of Heterogeneous and Complex Sources
Christian Futter (University of Basel)

Employing Neural Networks to Analyse Historical Printed Sources at Scale
Ina Serif (University of Basel)

Dictionary-Based Parser Innovation for High-Precision Extraction
Sorin Marti / Lea Kasper (University of Basel)

Operating Historical Data Resources for the Global Research Community: The Dodis Experience 1972–2022
Sacha Zala (Dodis, University of Bern)
12:00 – 14:00Lunch Break
14:00 – 16:15

Panel III
Sharing Documents, Securing Preservation

Introduction to Panel III: Publishing Data Resources for Long-Term Accessibility
Tom Lamberty (Merve Verlag, Leipzig)

Chair: Christiane Sibille (ETH Zurich)
Discussant:Michael D. Hildreth (University of Notre Dame)

Publishing Copyright-Free Taxonomic Treatments as New Resources for Biodiversity Research
Donat Agosti (Plazi, Bern)

Building Research Data Preservation Infrastructure from FOSS Components
Neil Jefferies (University of Oxford)

Making Large-scale Infrastructure Investments Work Cross-Domain
Tim Smith (CERN, Geneva)
14:00 – 16:15

Panel IV
Citizenship and the Protection of Civilians

Chair: Toshiki Mogami (International Christian University, Tokyo)
Discussant: Madeleine Herren-Oesch (University of Basel)

The Situation of Japanese Immigrants in the U.S. during the Second World War
Masato Ninomiya (University of São Paulo)

Japanese Occupation and Civilian Internment Policy in East and Southeast Asia, 1941–1945
Robert Cribb (Australian National University, Canberra)

Protecting Civilians in Relation to Citizenship and Military Conflicts: A Historical Perspective regarding the XIX and XX Centuries of the French Empire
Anne Raffin (National University of Singapore)

Testing the Limits of Citizenship: The Treatment of Enemy Civilians in the Dutch Colonial Empire
Kim Wünschmann (Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden, Hamburg)
16:45 – 18:00

Concluding Roundtable Discussion

Chair:Toshiki Mogami (International Christian University, Tokyo)

18:00 – 19:00Apéro riche

 


Further Information & Downloads


Further Events

On September 9, 2022, the workshop "Citizen/Stateless Person/Cosmopolitan: Refugee Selfhood in Global Intellectual and Legal History" takes place in St Andrews. It is organized by Vienna University and the Institute of Legal and Constitutional Research, University of St Andrews. You can find the program here.