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Epilogue: Captive Labor and Fraternization After the Second World War

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Part of the book series: Genders and Sexualities in History ((GSX))

Abstract

The Epilogue argues that the changing nature of warfare after the middle of the twentieth century has drastically reduced the need for prisoner of war (POW) labor and, with it, the opportunities for contacts with local women. Pre-modern notions of captive enemy personnel as criminals, misguided, or heretics have gained prominence again, while states with high military capabilities have come to see them as unwanted burden and developed forms of military engagements which limit the chances of creating POWs. As a result, cross-cultural contacts between migrants from abroad and local women are nowadays the indirect result of armed conflict and inequality around the world rather than the direct result of war captivity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Neville Wylie and James Crossland, “The Korean War and the Post-war Prisoner of War Regime, 1945–1956,” War in History 23, no. 4 (2016): 443–445.

  2. 2.

    Brigadier General Joseph V. Dillon, Provost Marshal General of the U.S. Air Force, in: “The Genesis of the 1959 Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War,” Miami Law Quarterly 40, no. 51 (1950): 5, quoted in: Howard S. Levie, “The Employment of Prisoners of War,” American Journal of International Law 57, no. 2 (April 1963): 229, note 45.

  3. 3.

    Convention (III) Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Geneva, 12 August 1949, Articles 49–57 and 62.

  4. 4.

    Henry Rousso, “By Way of Conclusion,” in Anne-Marie Pathé and Fabien Théofilakis (eds.), Wartime Captivity in the 20th Century: Archives, Stories, Memories, translated by Helen McPhail (New York: Berghahn, 2016), 281.

  5. 5.

    All parties involved in the conflict had signed the 1949 Geneva Convention, but none had ratified it. Nevertheless, they did pledge to abide by the humanitarian principles upon which the Convention rested. Cheryl Benard et al., The Battle Behind the Wire: U.S. Prisoner and Detainee Operations from World War II to Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2011), 18–19. Wylie and Crossland, “The Korean War,” 450.

  6. 6.

    Benard et al., The Battle Behind the Wire, 20–25.

  7. 7.

    Paul J. Springer, America’s Captives: Treatment of POWs from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 171–172.

  8. 8.

    Robert C. Doyle, The Enemy in Our Hands: America’s Treatment of Enemy Prisoners of War from the Revolution to the War on Terror (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2010), 252–254.

  9. 9.

    Man-ho Heo, “North Korea’s Continued Detention of South Korean POWs Since the Korean and Vietnam Wars,” Korean Journal of Defense Analysis 14, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 149–152.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., 164. The POWs were eventually encouraged to marry by their captors. Laura Bicker, “North Korea enslaved South Korean Prisoners of War in Coal Mines,” BBC News, Seoul, Feb. 25, 2021. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-56178271 [accessed March 16, 2021].

  11. 11.

    Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts (Protocol II), 8 June 1977, Article 4.f.

  12. 12.

    Nadia Al-Dayel, Andrew Mumford, and Kevin Bales, “Not yet Dead: The Establishment and Regulation of Slavery by the Islamic State,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2020.1711590.

  13. 13.

    Sylvie Thénault, “Wartime Internment of Algerians in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: For a History of Forms of Captivity in the Long Term,” in Pathé and Théofilakis (eds.), Wartime Captivity, 195.

  14. 14.

    Springer, America’s Captives, 184–186.

  15. 15.

    S.P. Salunke, Pakistani POWs in India (New Delhi: Vikas Publ. House, 1977), 18–23. Jonathan F. Vance, “India-Pakistan Wars (1965–1971),” in Jonathan F. Vance (ed.), Encyclopedia of Prisoners of War and Internment (2nd ed.; Millerton, NY: Grey House Publishing, 2006), 192–193.

  16. 16.

    Howard S. Levie, “Legal Aspects of the Continued Detention of the Pakistani Prisoners of War by India,” American Journal of International Law 67, no. 3 (July 1973): 512–515. Ghulam Mustafa and Qasim Shahzad Gill, “The Issue of Prisoners of War (POWS), 1971 and Recognition of Bangladesh,” International Journal of Business and Social Research 4, no. 3 (March 2014): 114–118.

  17. 17.

    Donald N. Zillman, “Political Uses of Prisoners of War,” Arizona State Law Journal 1975, no. 2 (1975): 237–274.

  18. 18.

    A.J. Barker, Behind Barbed Wire (London: Purnell Book Services, 1974), 112.

  19. 19.

    Reinhard Nachtigal, “Labor,” in Vance (ed.), Encyclopedia, 231–233.

  20. 20.

    Ray Takeyh, “The Iran-Iraq War: A Reassessment,” Middle East Journal 64, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 365.

  21. 21.

    Yücel Yanīkdaǧ, “Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988),” in Vance (ed.), Encyclopedia, 207–208. Pierre Razoux, The Iran-Iraq War, translated by Nicholas Elliott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2015), 299.

  22. 22.

    Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh, Iranian Women and Gender in the Iran-Iraq War (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2021), 32, 245–281.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 268. International Committee of the Red Cross, Annual Report 1988 (Geneva, 1989), 79. Yanīkdaǧ, “Iran-Iraq War,” 207.

  24. 24.

    Yanīkdaǧ, “Iran-Iraq War,” 208.

  25. 25.

    Paul J. Springer, “Abandoning Traditional Concepts of Prisoners of War: Military Captives in the Twenty-First Century,” in Daniel Krebs and Lorien Foote (eds.), Useful Captives: The Role of POWs in American Military Conflicts (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2021), 133–136.

  26. 26.

    On the impact of prisoners in American society and politics see, for example: Dominic Tierney, “Prisoner Dilemmas: The American Obsession with POWs and Hostages,” Orbis 54, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 130–145.

  27. 27.

    Springer, “Abandoning,” 143.

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Reiss, M. (2022). Epilogue: Captive Labor and Fraternization After the Second World War. In: Reiss, M., Feltman, B.K. (eds) Prisoners of War and Local Women in Europe and the United States, 1914-1956. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83830-0_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83830-0_11

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