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

With an introduction by Lindsay Benstead, Department Chair and Professor of Politics and Global Affairs, and Director of the Middle East Studies Center.

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.