Inhumanitarianism: the origins and purposes of the modern refugee regime | Laura Robson

The Department of History and the Friends of History
Present

Inhumanitarianism: the origins and purposes of the modern refugee regime by

Laura Robson, Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University

DETAILS:
📅 March 05, 2026
🕑 5:00 PM
📍 Smith Memorial Student Union (SMSU 298)
1825 SW Broadway
Portland, OR 97201
Accessible Entrance

In-person Event
Free and Open to the Public with RSVP
RSVP here:
https://bit.ly/FOHRobson

The advent of internationalist refugee aid has long been told as an inspirational story of humanitarians fighting tirelessly for a system for that would recognize and guarantee the rights of displaced and dispossessed people. But in fact, modern refugee policy has long had a different goal: to make use of refugees as cheap workers in an emerging system of global industrial capitalism. This talk traces the century-long history of attempts to remake refugees as cut-rate, disposable migrant labor, from the use of Balkan refugees as settlers in the late Ottoman Empire to Roosevelt’s mid-century hopes to use German Jewish refugees as laborers in Latin America to contemporary European efforts to deploy Syrians as low-wage workers in remote regions of Jordan – revealing the deep-seated commitment to refugee exploitation and containment at the heart of a purportedly humanitarian international regime.