Displaced Workers? The Question of Labour and the Making of a Global Refugee Regime

Public Lecture

The idea that refugees above all posed a labour problem – one that might be solved by large-scale industrial employment in colonial or neo-colonial settings – represented a background assumption of modern refugee policy from its beginnings. From the League of Nations’ Nansen Office to Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime “M Project” (for Migration), through the resettlement schemes of the post-1945 International Refugee Organization and UNRWA’s worker placement practices for displaced Palestinians, schemes for the distribution of refugees as labourers dominated twentieth century attempts to address issues of mass displacement. This talk explores how colonial and neocolonial spaces from the Middle East to Latin America came to serve as laboratories for remaking refugees as mobile labour pools – a process supported by the simultaneous development of a body of international law redefining displaced populations as voluntary participants in Western-backed industrial development schemes across the Global South.

Speaker and Chair

Dr Laura Robson is the Oliver-McCourtney Professor of History at Penn State University and a current Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. She has written or edited five books, most recently The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East (Oxford, 2020), a history of the relationship between violence and the state in the twentieth-century Eastern Mediterranean, and Partitions: A Transnational History of 20th Century Territorial Separatism (with Arie Dubnov; Stanford, 2019), a comparative examination of the political “solution” of ethnic partition in the decolonizing world. Her current book project is an investigation of twentieth century schemes to deploy refugees as labour migrants across the globe. 

Dr Tanya Harmer is a specialist on the Cold War in Latin America with a particular interest in the international, transnational and global dynamics of the struggle. She obtained her BA at the University of Leeds and her MA and PhD in International History at the London School of Economics. She has written widely on Chile’s revolutionary process in the 1970s, the Cuban Revolution’s influence in Latin America, counter-revolution and inter-American diplomacy, solidarity networks, women and gender. Twitter: @TanyaHarmer

More About This Event

This event is will be recorded as a podcast and made available to the public soon after.

The Department of International History (@lsehistory) teaches and conducts research on the international history of Britain, Europe and the world from the early modern era up to the present day.

Sponsored by the Department's Modern World History Research Cluster.