Review. Laura Robson, Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work.
This is the second of two reviews of this exciting intervention in the field. Read E. Kyle Romero’s review here.
Refugee historians often struggle to understand why certain forcibly displaced people have benefitted from the refugee regime while others haven’t. We know generally that people from the Global North are much more likely to receive long-term durable solutions, such as resettlement, whereas people from the Global South often find themselves contained in camps in their ‘region of origin’. Like TWAIL scholar Arnulf Becker Lorca has noted: “The language to create the gap changes over time – race, civilization, economic development – but the gap is always the same: European/non-European, First/Third World, Global-North/South.” But in legal terms, the refugee regime does not necessarily discriminate, nor was it designed for Europeans only. It remains hard to make sense of the mechanisms behind the schism that is so obvious.
Laura Robson tries to resolve the dilemma by expanding our understanding of the current refugee regime through the lens of “putting refugees to work”. Instead of just looking at UNHCR and the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, she also studies the parallel developments for Palestinian refugees at UNWRA and sees how the separation of these two systems created the blueprint for the differential treatment between European refugees and those fleeing within the Global South. Yet, Laura also goes beyond the UN system, to look at forced displacement in the Ottoman and later in the Soviet world. Her deep understanding of the convergences and divergences of these separate systems that ultimately shaped the post-Second World War world will change how we understand the current refugee system for good.
Human Capital identifies two sources of the modern refugee regime: first, the dissolution and denationalization of the Ottoman Empire, where for the first time people were unprotected because they could no longer claim consular protection from any state. The Ottoman state-centered refugee regime that emerged in response focused on permanent resettlement and labour to re-integrate these refugees into a polity. Second, the European reaction to Easter European Jews, who were kept out of almost all European nations, but used by the colonial powers for imperial development of colonial territories elsewhere. The culmination of these developments occurred in Ottoman Palestine, where “the figure of the stateless refugee first began to appear to the imperial powers – first Ottoman and then British – as a problem that might, if things went well, also provide an opportunity.” The opportunity consisted of turning a profit, by putting these people to work after their resettlement. This work could be manyfold, including military service for the empire.
Laura shows convincingly who from the 1920s onwards, refugees were used for imperial development, even when refugees themselves objected their resettlement in remote imperial spaces. In the 1930s, when American ‘economic globalization’ led to a shift in leadership (inter alia in refugee related matters) from Europe to the United States, “scientific population engineering” (not in small part inspired by the Nazis’ phantasy about ethnically homogenous nation-states) became the mantra. Top-down resettlement decisions served to distribute the population across the globe to advance American impact throughout its informal empire, especially in spaces like the Middle East and Latin America. But this form of resettlement also helped the institutional expansion of organizations such as UNHCR. Groups like the Hungarians in the 1950s, and the Ugandan Asians, Chileans and Vietnamese in the 1970s all served similar purposes.
By the 1960s, however, it became increasingly less interesting to use refugee resettlement to resolve global labor shortages in imperial spaces (that for imperialists’ sake were imagined to be sparsely inhabited). Due to the growth of international labor migration, resettled refugee laborers became increasingly less viable, because they had more rights (however limited) compared to “migrant laborers who had no such claim on international protection”. Here, Laura discerns the emergence of the two-tier refugee system where small numbers of European refugees remained eligible for resettlement in the Global North, while Middle Eastern, African and Asian refugees – now the majority – suffered confinement in their own region. This regime of containment, “a fully-fledged carceral system” in Laura’s words, was based on the experience of the Palestinians, who had been contained and exploited as cheap laborers since their flight from their homelands in the 1940s. The theory, as laid out in the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol, of legal protection to restore refugees’ rights, and the practice of confinement and incarceration, grew ever further apart from the 1960s onwards. Examples like the Jordan Compact, which created ‘Special Economic Zones’ for Syrian refugees from 2016 onwards show that this system is dominant today.
This is, according to Laura, because institutionally this divide was a major success, that guaranteed “continued superpower support for internationalist refugee organizations that were able to demonstrate a capacity to prevent refugees from disturbing the political and economic equilibrium.” UNHCR thus complied to a system that served to maintain the old imperial power hierarchy, perpetuating the eternal gap (in Becker Lorca’s words). The system, however, completely disregards the needs and aspirations of refugees themselves, leaving Laura to suggest that the dissolution of the regime might be disastrous to Global Northern states, but not so much for the refugees themselves.
With Human Capital Laura Robson has written a paradigm shifting account of our current refugee regime, which does so much more than telling us the uncanny story of refugees as cheap labor. It shows us the birth of the current neoliberal refugee system, without however, defining it. This is perhaps a small flaw of the book, that it never really considers what the relationship between neoliberalism and the refugee system is. It might perhaps have helped to explain some other developments that are not fully developed in the book, such as the relationship between American and British forms of imperial development, which in Laura’s account seem to have logically followed upon and substituted each other, while both forms overlapped, coincided and got entangled in interesting configurations, especially in the Middle East. It could perhaps also help us understand the situation in Latin America a bit better. It is obvious that Laura knows the Middle East better and somehow disregards a little bit the internal developments in the Latin world. Human Capital is a very exciting starting point for all these new and thought-provoking questions, and I cannot wait to see this conversation progressing.
