Introduction
In 1948 the newly constituted United Nations, blasted by accusations that it was at least partly responsible for the displacement unfolding in Palestine, established a new organization to ensure that the war’s mass expulsions would not result in further death. Replacing a short-lived ‘disaster relief’ programme, the new United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees (UNRPR) proposed partnering with a variety of humanitarian providers to offer succour to the three-quarters of a million Palestinians driven from their homes in the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. ‘The choice is between saving the lives of many thousands of people now or permitting them to die’, wrote UN Mediator for Palestine Folke Bernadotte, days before his assassination at the hands of Lehi terrorists:
The situation of the majority of these hapless refugees is already tragic, and to prevent them from being overwhelmed by further disaster and to make possible their ultimate rehabilitation, it is my earliest hope that the international community will give all necessary support to make the measures I have outlined fully effective. I believe that for the international community to accept its share of responsibility for the refugees of Palestine is one of the minimum conditions for the success of its efforts to bring peace to that land.Footnote 1
In Gaza, the organization charged with carrying out this work was a Quaker one: the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), headquartered in Philadelphia but with a long-standing presence in Palestine.Footnote 2 Its decision-makers accepted the assignment with a degree of trepidation, uncertain about either their operational capacities or the end goal of the work; but, in the end, they agreed to the job. Over the next eighteen months, the AFSC established an aid regime fully recognizable as such in the contemporary world: they distributed food, set up tents, opened clinics, and provided water. More reluctantly, and under increasing external pressure, they also began to use this material aid as a tool to accomplish other tasks that the UN had started to view as key elements of any modern refugee administration: negotiating with host governments to guarantee extraterritorial rights for aid providers, determining a level of minimum provisioning for their refugee wards, and—above all—monitoring and documenting refugees with a view to limiting their physical movement and differentiating between ‘genuine’ and ‘false’ claims to assistance. Even as they expressed reservations about such approaches, AFSC workers hoped that their efforts would establish conditions conducive to negotiating a permanent political solution, the precise nature of which remained open to constructive debate.
But as 1949 wore on, some AFSC members began to think that their work was being turned to a different end. The initial agreement they had signed with the UN noted sharply that ‘We would not be prepared to undertake this minimum service of relief unless we could be assured that a solution to the vital problem of resettlement is being vigorously sought by U.N.’ Now, as time passed and nothing happened in the political realm, the AFSC began to ask whether its activities might in fact be proving actively deleterious to the refugees they had hoped to help.Footnote 3 Was it possible that providing food to destitute refugees could be prolonging and legitimizing their exile? Might the issuance of shelter and the provision of water be bricks in the wall of refugees’ long-term political, economic, and material degradation? Was doing something, in fact, actually worse than doing nothing?
Their answer, in the end, was yes. In 1950, citing profound uncertainty about the nature of its own actions in Gaza, the AFSC pulled out of the relief effort and turned over its supplies and systems to the emerging United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). It was not alone in its objections; the League of Red Cross Societies joined the AFSC in its protests that there had been insufficient international effort to force a permanent settlement, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) too withdrew from its mission in the early 1950s, leaving the field to the agency that would eventually become one of the UN’s largest operations.Footnote 4 From its inception, UNRWA aimed to develop further the basic practices that the AFSC had so reluctantly set up in Gaza, using the distribution of food and shelter as mechanisms to enforce ‘order’ (that is, to restrict movement) and to surveille, document, and delimit refugees and their claims. As AFSC workers both witnessed and participated in the institutionalization of these modern forms of refugee assistance, their observations increasingly led them—reluctantly and incompletely and with a high degree of uncertainty—to ask whether this emerging refugee regime’s goals might not be the resolution of mass displacement but rather its containment and prolongation.
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Historians have been slow to enter into refugee studies; though there are of course plenty of historical studies of displaced people, their authors have tended not to categorize such work as part of any broader consideration of displacement as a global phenomenon or think about refugee history as a field in itself.Footnote 5 Instead, scholars of various forms of modern mass displacement have charted more regionally, thematically, and temporally specific lines of inquiry. Noteworthy examples have included studies of the early refugee regimes developed by an the Ottoman state facing the mass expulsion of Muslims from the late nineteenth century Balkans and Caucasus; the conceptual development of ‘human rights’ and its application to displaced people; the wartime genesis of the post-1945 refugee regime, with its emphasis on economic rebuilding of Europe and its near-total exclusion of non-Europeans; the contested admission of decolonial refugees and the development of parallel ‘national refugee’ aid regimes in places like post-partition India; and the deployment of refugee resettlement to serve American imperial interests during the early decades of the Cold War.Footnote 6 It is notable that this kind of limited but serious historical work on displacement has come almost exclusively from historians firmly situated within regional frames and embedded at least to some degree in area studies—not from global or even more modestly transnational approaches.
Indeed, the subfield of global history has been strikingly reluctant to consider the phenomenon of modern refugeehood at all, much less approach the political complications surrounding internationalist responses to mass displacement. In part, this might be because both the phenomenon of refugeehood and the potential ‘solutions’ that have been offered with respect to it are difficult to reconcile with how global historians, in their not so long ago heyday, tended to understand their field as ‘history fit for the now-defunct Clinton Global Initiative’, in Jeremy Adelman’s words, ‘a shiny, high-profile endeavour emphasising borderless, do-good storytelling about our cosmopolitan commonness, global history to give globalisation a human face’. Global history, as Adelman observed, largely understood movement as advancement; it ‘privileged motion over place, histoires qui bougent (stories that move) over tales of those who got left behind, narratives about others for the selves who felt some connection—of shared self-interest or empathy—between far-flung neighbours of the global cosmopolis’.Footnote 7 Even the most straightforward descriptions of modern mass displacement and its attendant aid regimes necessarily suggested the inadequacies of such one-world analyses. The very fact of national or ethnic displacements, and the tendency of dislocated populations to cling stubbornly to the local and the national, undermined global history’s narratives about migration as a form of networking and connection and undercut its claims about international institutions as venues for relationship-building, exchange, and linkage. Within global history, perhaps for this reason, refugeehood was long largely ignored.
It is only very recently that global history has begun to allow in conversations about refugees and the kinds of issues their displacement tends to surface: discussions, for instance, of the border-confirming and state-empowering practices of internationalist humanitarian institutions, or the ways in which structures of aid deliberately effaced refugee stories and refugee imaginaries, or how the specifics of refugee politics tended to remind international actors and activists of the intractable and unavoidable demands of the nation-state.Footnote 8 Still mostly absent from this literature is a serious historical approach to the core question of whether refugee aid might, at its core, serve irremediably inhumane ends—a question that other fields within refugee studies have seen as unavoidably central. Anthropologist Barbara Harrell-Bond’s old question ‘Can Humanitarian Work with Refugees Be Humane?’ (an inquiry she described as apparently akin to ‘sending mother’s apple pie to the Food and Drug Administration for chemical analysis or turning the family dog over to medical research’)Footnote 9 has over the years been followed by many other similar anthropological and legal investigations, such as Didier Fassin’s studies of the toxic implications of what he calls ‘humanitarian reason’ in the context of refugee assistance, or Liisa Malkki’s ground-breaking studies of the consequences of violence, displacement, and aid for displaced communities in East Africa.Footnote 10 But few historians have followed the lead of colleagues in other fields to approach the (essentially historical, after all) question of whether and how aid might have been designed deliberately to circumscribe the rights of its recipients.Footnote 11 Indeed, they have broadly presented the more familiar case that the development of the refugee regime was fundamentally well-intentioned even if limited and insufficient. As renowned historian Peter Gatrell put it to a public readership in 2022, ‘large movements of refugees have spurred the development of more humane and just approaches to refugee settlement’. He added, ‘In an imperfect world, where at least 82.4 million people were forcibly displaced by the end of 2020, it’s worth remembering these efforts … Calamity has often been the crucible of change.’Footnote 12
The AFSC archives on Gaza in 1948–1950 do not support this analysis. Instead, they invite the question of why and how workers providing aid to displaced people might have come to an opposite conclusion: that the international order they were enabling was less committed to the rehabilitation of displaced people than to a long-term project of mass dispossession and mass immobilization. The AFSC’s executive body and its workers on the ground had imagined a brief and limited provision of emergency materials while repatriation or resettlement was negotiated—a radically different project from what they felt they had accidentally midwifed, which was a practice of aid that essentially guaranteed and legitimized the permanence of Palestinian displacement. Under pressure from their international overseers, the AFSC reluctantly witnessed itself helping to create a regime that deployed material aid as a mechanism of documentation, surveillance, and containment; carefully minimized standards of living for refugees through judicious restrictions on that material aid; and built a practice of permanent extraterritorial rights for aid agencies and aid workers on the basis of humanitarian distance from politics. Its eventual withdrawal from the scene was grounded in a self-assessment that understood all these actions as having fundamentally damaged the community of displaced people the AFSC had intended to serve and help. A tightly focused examination of this rather contrarian institution’s account of its eighteen months in Gaza, then, suggests something that state- and international-level sources do not, and that historians have barely admitted as a possibility: that the particulars of international aid provision were deliberately designed, over the protests of their earliest enactors, not as a humanitarian intervention but as a medium- to long-term system of physical control over the expelled.Footnote 13
From Europe to Gaza: The AFSC’s entrance into Palestinian refugee politics
The AFSC was a Quaker organization with a political back story: it was founded in 1917 with the specific remit of providing alternatives to military service for American pacificists and conscientious objectors. From the beginning, refugeehood and displacement was a primary venue for this alternative wartime work; towards the end of the war the AFSC supported refugee resettlements in northern France and in Russia, and after the formation of the League of Nations it acted as a lobbyist for the rights of displaced people and their protection in international law.Footnote 14 Its famine relief efforts in Russia and emergency relief work in Spain during the civil war cemented its status as a ‘preeminent American aid and relief organization with a political inclination towards controversy’, as two of its institutional chroniclers put it.Footnote 15 Clarence Pickett, who became the AFSC’s executive secretary in 1929 and served for more than two decades, was a close collaborator of Eleanor Roosevelt, who donated most of the proceeds from her newspaper column and radio speeches to the organization. As the Nazi threat to European Jews became clearer, the AFSC also (mostly unsuccessfully) advocated for Jewish resettlement in the United States, particularly for children, and lent teams of workers to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration for refugee-related projects in Greece, Egypt, Yugoslavia, China, and Italy. In 1947 the AFSC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with its British counterpart, drawing praise for making ‘no distinction between friend and foe’ in its approach to relief and aid.Footnote 16
Though the AFSC itself was a relatively new organization, Quakers had a long history and presence in Palestine. The Friends school in Ramallah, established in 1869, represented an important educational presence during the mandate and had trained some of Palestine’s most prominent Arab figures, including the anti-Zionist thinker and writer Khalil Totah. Quakerism—particularly the British variety—had already begun to weigh in on the situation in Palestine, with a ‘Palestine Watching Committee’ based in London that tried to help disseminate the work of the Arab-run Palestine Information Centre and frequently offered sharp critiques of mandatory policy.Footnote 17 Despite the strong strand of anti-Zionist thought in interwar Quakerism in Britain and in Palestine itself, the AFSC (unlike nearly every other Protestant operation on the ground in the Middle East) offered an official endorsement to the partition resolution that passed in the General Assembly in November of 1947, and subsequently sent representatives to Palestine with the idea that they might be able to act as mediators and negotiators. Instead, the UN approached them to staff the refugee relief effort in Egyptian-administered Gaza, where a pre-war population of perhaps 80,000 residents had now been joined by some 250,000 refugees from other parts of Palestine.
The request acknowledged an already-extant reality on the ground, which was the much-touted fact that early refugee relief efforts for Palestinians after the 1948 war were almost exclusively carried out by private (and mainly Christian) organizations. As one historian of this moment notes, ‘This self-congratulatory tone was not unjustified … Christian humanitarian mobilization [in Palestine] preceded the deployment of United Nations resources and personnel by two crucial years.’Footnote 18 AFSC members were already worried about the long-term ramifications of expanding such aid. Their confidence in the UN was not robust; as one official put it, the proposal raised concerns ‘that the UN seems so helpless under such conditions that it is considering turning to a small group like the AFSC for help’.Footnote 19 Indeed, some of them thought it was far from clear that the UN would be a long-term player in this or any other conflict: ‘This relief issue [might] be the turning-point which would determine whether the UN shall be an effective instrument, or shall have to be written off as a failure.’Footnote 20 Others worried about collaborating with the Egyptian military occupying Gaza, with the accompanying unenviable task of convincing ‘the top people of Egypt that we are really disinterested, trustworthy, and not the agents of Western imperialisms. That is a very difficult task.’Footnote 21 But, above all, the AFSC did not want any relief effort to obscure or postpone a political settlement for the displaced. ‘If the AFSC undertakes this project’, Pickett declared, ‘it would be with the understanding that the emphasis would be put on resettlement rather than relief.’ Rather prophetically, his summary added, ‘Unless a place is found for the refugees to live, relief is an endless task.’Footnote 22
Still, the need seemed apparent. ‘We have a deep sense of inadequacy’, concluded the Executive Committee, ‘but after extended discussion we are not able in clear conscience to decline to serve.’Footnote 23 The leadership negotiated in careful detail with the UNRPR, hoping to arrive at an agreement that would pre-empt its concerns. The conditions for their participation were eventually set out in an arrangement the AFSC referred to as the ‘nineteen points’, setting out logistical and financial arrangements and centring the AFSC’s long-established Quaker operational practices. But the document’s most central prerequisites were of a different nature. ‘The nature of our activities’, point 7 ran, ‘would be that of emergency relief—attempting to preserve life and health and provide shelter for those whose destitution arises from the present troubles, without any discrimination except for human need.’ Point 8 continued, ‘We would not be prepared to undertake this minimum service of relief unless we could be assured that a solution to the vital problem of resettlement is being vigorously sought by U.N., and all others vitally concerned.’Footnote 24 In other words, this was to be a temporary arrangement to be undertaken only in conjunction with serious efforts at either return or some form of resettlement for the displaced.
The UNRPR’s vision
The immediate post–Second World War years were marked by radical uncertainty with respect to the global political question of mass displacement. At the end of the conflict, Europe was host to millions of refugees, many of them detained in internment camps under the auspices of the wartime United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and later the International Refugee Organization. Negotiations had begun over some kind of definition of the refugee to replace the shrunken interwar categories, but ‘refugee’ remained for the moment an inchoate legal concept.Footnote 25 The 1948 war for Palestine, coming, as it did, in the midst of these debates, necessarily shaped ideas about what the brand-new United Nations and its superpower leadership might be able to accomplish with respect to mass displacement. Indeed, the expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians who had become stateless refugees with Israel’s near-total refusal to consider permitting their return served as a galvanizing moment for the new post-war internationalism. Displaced Palestinians’ new political existence as wards of the UN simultaneously indicted the new organization and reified it; as a representative from Lebanon put it to the General Assembly in 1950, ‘The Palestine refugees were therefore a direct responsibility on the part of the United Nations.’Footnote 26 It was an assessment in which internationalist thinkers saw possibility as well as blame.
In this context, the very emergence of the agency with whom the AFSC was negotiating was already delineating certain de facto principles vis-à-vis a post-war internationalist refugee regime carrying implications for the long term. The UNRPR was one of two bodies the UN established at the end of the 1948, the other being the United Nations Conciliation Commission on Palestine (UNCCP)—a small committee of representatives from the United State, France, and Turkey, charged with ‘tak[ing] steps to assist the Governments and authorities concerned to achieve a final settlement of all questions outstanding between them’.Footnote 27 The UNRPR’s mandate was separate: to ‘extend aid to Palestine refugees’ via a special donation fund, on Bernadotte’s premise that ‘the alleviation of conditions of starvation and distress among the Palestine refugees is one of the minimum conditions for the success of the efforts of the United Nations to bring peace to that land’.Footnote 28 In other words, the earliest organizational efforts at the international level to address the outcomes of the 1948 war helped establish a key principle that would eventually be applied well beyond Palestine itself: that there was such a thing as apolitical humanitarian aid.Footnote 29
The UNRPR now had to decide what such a ‘non-political’ approach might look like in practice. Days after concluding its agreement with the AFSC, the new operation held a meeting at the offices of the UN’s Disaster Relief Project in Beirut with representatives of the AFSC alongside the League of Red Cross Societies, taking charge of relief in Lebanon, Syria, and parts of Jordan; the ICRC, doing the same in Jordan and Israel; and UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund). In the first instance, the question of who qualified as a refugee—an issue simultaneously under discussion, in a broader legal key, in the negotiations over the forthcoming Refugee Convention—emerged as a central preoccupation.Footnote 30 Discussing displacement numbers, Raphael Cilento (about to take over as UNRPR head) told the gathering,
The refugee population was distributed as follows: Lebanon, 60,000; Syria, 80,000 (which gradually increased to 110,000); Transjordan, 80,000; North Palestine, 237,000; and in Gaza, 83,000.
These were accepted as ‘true’ refugees, though the status of certain of those in North and South Palestine was doubtful since they had not been thrown over the Governmental border of the new Jewish State—the original criterion for ‘refugee’. The definition of refugee is no longer firm. It is not possible to distinguish between the ‘true’ refugee and the evacuee who has been forced from his home near the firing line, and has retreated to the nearest Arab town within some Arab area. Moreover, the incoming agencies have made it clear that they are not in a position to discriminate and it is recognized that this might involve political decisions of a difficult nature.Footnote 31
It was an important moment, establishing the idea (even as it acknowledged attendant problems) that there were ‘genuine’ refugees who had been moved across an emerging international border and ‘false’ versions who were claiming aid on the basis of exigency—which might be real, and indeed obviously caused by the war, but did not entitle them to international assistance. Recognizing the practical difficulties, the UNRPR leadership nevertheless went on to assign aid providers the core task of differentiating between true and false refugees and distributing aid accordingly. UNRPR director Stanton Griffis made this point clear to the various bodies working among Palestinians in the spring of 1949. ‘This total [refugee count], whatever it might be had little relation to the actual number of bona fide refugees … The others are from the Nomadic tribes’, he instructed his staff. ‘They filter in and out of the camps and it is extremely difficult, if not impossible to separate them from the real refugees.’ Nevertheless, they would have to undertake the task, since ‘the funds at the disposal of the United Nations for Palestinian Refugees was [sic] limited.’Footnote 32
Such conversations pointed toward two other general principles UNRPR was now beginning to articulate. The first was that the material requirements of the refugee population could be adjusted downwards as financial conditions necessitated. The UNRPR’s principle of ‘minimum essential need’—assisting refugees only to the degree necessary for physical survival, and with perpetual reference to money as the basic underlying organizational principle of the operation—shaped operations in practical as well as theoretical ways. Relief funds were not to be used for purposes that went beyond the assurance of basic survival; in another UNRPR official’s words, money was ‘available only for this feeding and primary shelter’.Footnote 33 Further, ‘in the equitable distribution of relief’, as UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie wrote, ‘the operating agencies will, insofar as possible, take into account the numerical importance of the respective communities to be assisted … the requirements of those in greatest need with have priority over the requirements of those in lesser need’.Footnote 34 In this vision, then, it was not the fact of the refugees’ displacement but the measure of their desperation that would open the gates to aid, a determination assigned, as a primary task, to agency staff.
In a more quotidian sense, it also meant that the determination of need was forever fungible and subject to downward adjustment—another job assigned to aid workers. The Secretary-General’s report on UNRPR’s work, coming in November of 1949, outlined precisely such a process:
The budget originally recommended by the Acting Mediator envisaged a food intake of 2,000 calories per refugee per day. … In February 1949, the value of the combined UNRPR-UNICEF average ration was reduced to 1,800 calories daily, as the total number of rations claimed by the agencies increased. In March, when total rations issued had risen to 855,000, the combined UNRPR-UNICEF ration was reduced to 1,700 calories per day … [In mid-May] the ration scale was recalculated in order to provide almost 1,6000 calories per person per day, while maintaining the bulk in the ration by provision of the maximum quantity of flour from UNRPR sources. The revised ration permitted an increase in the amount of flour and a decrease in other commodities.
Connecting the conversation into the broader question of refugee work requirements, the report added, ‘So long as most of the adult males in the refugee population do not perform regular work necessitating the expenditure of any considerable amount of physical energy, their rations should provide adequate nourishment.’Footnote 35
Finally, the UNRPR established a key operational requirement for international aid: the capacity to work outside the constraints of host states’ governmental structures, even while also looking to them for financial assistance. The three-way agreement between the AFSC, the UNRPR, and the Egyptian government detailing the conditions of relief work in Egyptian-controlled Gaza established refugee aid operations as lying outside the bounds of state control. Relief organizations were to be issued written permits allowing their staff untrammelled movement across the border; they were entitled to free Egyptian labour to unload, handle, and store supplies and equipment; they claimed exemption from taxation and inspection of all relief-related goods; and they insisted on full Egyptian army responsibility for communications between Gaza and Port Said. Following on the UNRPR’s essential distinction between the political and the humanitarian, AFSC also guaranteed that its own personnel would not engage in political activity but would ‘confine themselves to their humanitarian tasks’.Footnote 36
Similar concerns featured in negotiations with Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, all of which were asked to continue contributing to the relief effort. These host states were asked to ‘assume responsibility for the maintenance of order’ in all refugee reception spaces, while allowing the UNRPR and its associated organizations more or less free passage through their territory.Footnote 37 (This requirement was not extended to Israel, despite the AFSC’s continued work there and the practical difficulties posed by its avoidance; one UNRPR report lamented that ‘The curious shape of the Jewish State makes the route for the distribution of supplies [avoiding passage through Israel] a very tortuous and round-about one.’)Footnote 38 All the while, actual control over the refugee operations would remain firmly in the hands of the agencies—a requirement at which a number of participating host countries baulked. ‘Mr Griffis has made clear’, one AFSC report ran, ‘that all assistance to Arab refugees should be channeled through the three operating agencies collaborating with UNRPR. This has apparently contributed materially to this increased reluctance on the part of local governments. Indeed, Lebanon and Syria have stated publicly that after February 1, they will provide no more aid to the refugees.’Footnote 39 The emerging UN consensus was that aid agencies should operate outside the legal and political constraints of host states, even if it meant abandoning a potential source of assistance.
The UNRPR, then, was establishing a set of core principles around refugee aid in response to the specifics of conditions in and around Palestine: exemption of aid agencies from state systems, the segregation of material aid from processes of political settlement, the use of aid workers to determine and enforce distinctions between ‘true’ and ‘false’ refugeehood, the basic fungibility of requirements for survival, and the judicious deployment of basic supplies as a mode of keeping people in place. Over the longer term, all these would become principles of internationalist dealing with non-white refugees of decolonization, as earlier UNRRA-derived practices of legalized (though sometimes forcible) repatriation and resettlement were increasingly explicitly reserved for white European ‘convention’ refugees.Footnote 40 In the meantime, the establishment of such principles rapidly became sources of intense consternation among AFSC representatives working for the UNRPR in Gaza; and the subsequent year-plus of rocky collaboration between the two organizations featured major disagreements over what a refugee regime should look like, how it should operate, and what goals it should serve.
The AFSC’s pushback
As the UNRPR pressed its new contractors to adhere to its emerging internationalist priorities, many AFSC workers and officials—already uncertain about the validity of their work and at least a bit suspicious of the UN—came actively to oppose the kind of work they were being asked to carry out.Footnote 41 Specifically, they objected that refugee aid providers could, and should, refrain from claiming extraterritorial privilege; from determining minimum levels of ‘need’; and—above all—from taking on the task of documenting numbers or adjudicating the ‘genuineness’ of refugee claims. None of these principles, in the AFSC’s view, represented some sort of inevitable or unchallengeable aspect of an incipient refugee aid regime.
In the first instance, the AFSC broadly opposed the construction of some sort of UN-led semi-permanent internationalism assuming a state-like role and sought to recuse themselves from at least some of its privileges. ‘We do not want for any members of our team an official UN passport’, one early discussion declared,Footnote 42 and the organization similarly refused ‘armed protection for relief supply convoys or for personnel’.Footnote 43 This was not a consistent stance; AFSC workers quite often did claim the extraterritorial status that the UN insisted belonged to any humanitarian agency operating under internationalist auspices.Footnote 44 The detention of a Friends worker named Frita Eitel in an Egyptian police station, though temporary and brief, aroused fury on the part of the AFSC leadership who reminded the Egyptian war minister that such treatment was ‘in violation of the rights that the Quakers are meant to enjoy as representatives of the United Nations’, which included ‘immunity from personal arrest or detention’.Footnote 45 Relatedly, the AFSC and the UN also disagreed about the role and degree of assistance provided by local governments, in this case the Egyptian army. The UNRPR under Cilento regarded the Egyptian military as an institution to be kept at the greatest distance possible. (‘To be dependent on Egyptian army lorry transport would, in his opinion’, one AFSC official reported of Cilento, ‘be much too risky and irregular.’)Footnote 46 The AFSC, though, relied heavily on Egyptian assistance of various kinds; indeed, from the perspective of some of their refugee charges, the Egyptians and the AFSC were close collaborators in a project of oppression. A pamphlet circulated in the Gaza camps in the summer of 1949 accused them collectively of corruption, embezzlement, and political repression. ‘Refugees! In order to go back to your country and to get rid of a life of misery and deprivation form committees to protect your stolen rights’, it ran. ‘Tell the occupying tyrants “Evacuate our country and let us live free.” Down with the Anglo-American imperialism and all those who assist it!’Footnote 47 Language like this reflected one of the core assumptions of many of those witnessing this new aid regime: that its provision of food and shelter in situ was designed above all to restrain and prevent refugees’ attempts to return.
Bracketed together in this undesirable way, the AFSC and the Egyptian army came to a kind of grudging agreement, dividing duties between the Quaker responsibility for food distribution, staff hiring, and maintenance of the rolls, and the Egyptian responsibility for security, camp supervision, the maintenance of ‘order’, the physical arrangements of the camp, and ‘responsibility for legal bodies of camp; as the mucktars [sic]’.Footnote 48 Consequently, despite its general reluctance to deal with militaries of any kind, AFSC proved at least marginally more willing to acknowledge Egyptian authority than its UNRPR overseers. It agreed to assist with the Egyptian-ordered evacuation of the refugee camp at Kantara to Gaza in the summer of 1949 despite regarding it as a ‘retrograde step’, and acknowledged that ‘these Egyptian housed refugees have been incomparably better cared for than any in Gaza’—adding that ‘Their complaint, subsequent upon transfer, could be used as adverse publicity against UNRPR.’Footnote 49
The question of UNRPR’s documentary efforts, undertaken in service both of minimizing refugee numbers and keeping people in place, was more consequential still. Documentation was fundamental to the UNRPR’s vision of regional ‘order’; Howard Wriggins, an AFSC aid worker continuing in Gaza after stints in Lisbon, North Africa, Egypt, Italy, and France, reported to the AFSC office at the beginning of the project that ‘Cilento believes registration essential in order to keep track of the shifting population.’Footnote 50 In other words, it was first and foremost a tool for ensuring that the refugees would not be able to attempt a return or move around the region unsupervised. Second, UNRPR’s insistence on documenting a newly manufactured difference between ‘genuine’ and ‘false’ refugees was explicitly designed to enable the refusal of rations to as many people as possible—a goal the AFSC also actively opposed.
Noting the dire food situation for local Gazans and refugees alike in the months after the war, Wriggins vehemently protested such limits: ‘All Arabs with their homes in Palestine were destitute and proper subjects for public assistance … The category “refugee” is not only difficult to apply, but is quite unjust.’Footnote 51 Neither did he and his colleagues want to document refugee movement for the purposes of regional ‘order’, pre-emptively declaring that ‘Our ability to produce reports, statistics, etc. from the field will be very limited.’Footnote 52 Under intense pressure, though, the organization eventually acceded to a system of refugee status adjudication that essentially amounted to withholding food until local camp leaders agreed to report anomalies or fraud.Footnote 53 AFSC worker Donald Stevenson attended a meeting on ‘how to reduce registrations without violating Quaker principles’:
The withholding of food for the sole purpose of obtaining information was a question which raised very serious discussion among the group. A case was quoted of a village where the Mukhtars had been told that their lists must be cut by a certain date, otherwise the issue of food would be suspended. The group agreed that this action mean using food as a weapon to compel compliance by the refugee, and that it was an especially unquakerly action, as well as obviously a very potent use of force.Footnote 54
Th AFSC eventually agreed to continue the practice to the extent that it had already been implemented, but to eschew such tactics in future unless agreed on by all. ‘These proposals were accepted by all the camp leaders provisionally’, a report concluded, ‘but there was no unanimity of opinion on these questions.’Footnote 55
Arguments over these UN-assigned tasks of registration and documentation, with their inherent acceptance of the tasks of refugee constraint, adjudication, and punishment, plagued the AFSC throughout its eighteen-month stint in Gaza. Some AFSC workers accepted the idea that some kind of assessment of entitlements might be necessary. ‘I could not help but think that those who consider this problem a strong moral issue are the same ones who are unable to tackle the job of list reduction in what I would call a brave and honest way’, one account of internal dissent ran. ‘While recognizing the right of every individual to decide how far his conscience will take him, this must not be confused with inherent weakness in leadership.’Footnote 56 But many others considered the task both ethically objectionable and practically impossible. ‘While the AFSC worker attempted to insure himself that real refugees were not removed from the lists, this undoubtedly happened in some instances’, one memo reported, adding, ‘If AFSC staff members made careful and appropriate investigation of every refugee registered, it would require five years to reduce the lists to realistic numbers.’Footnote 57 A report detailing the AFSC’s tactics of pressing mukhtars to inform on registration irregularities, including the above-mentioned tactic of withholding food from entire villages, was received internally with a degree of horror. ‘In reality, I was actually embarrassed at what we had done’, one wrote. Another assessment was equally blunt: ‘This could be an ethical question … We tended to treat the individuals more and more like pieces of machinery.’Footnote 58
The AFSC further objected to the idea of maintaining the refugees for any substantive length of time at the level of what Giorgio Agamben would later famously call ‘bare life’.Footnote 59 The UN had already come under fire for its minimal standards of living; as one prominent American observer reported early in 1949, ‘The UN program is just enough to stave off starvation … no clothing, no permanent shelter, no teachers, no recreation, no adequate hospitalization and medical facilities.’Footnote 60 The initial agreements between the AFSC and the UNRPR indicated, already, an awareness of the minimalism of the UN’s assistance; they demanded, for instance, a pre-emptive guarantee that the daily calorie guarantee for refugees would remain above a certain level or trigger AFSC withdrawal. Other agencies too complained about the UNRPR’s unwillingness to provide more than basic supplies, even charging that it was actively preventing distribution. ‘Chief complaints centered around the presumed failure of UNRPR to supply non-food items, [such] as tents blankets, clothing and fuel’, recorded one account of an AFSC meeting with the Red Cross, ‘[and] the allegation that UNRPR was withholding funds and non-food supplies until a UN organization took over so as to “put the private agencies in a bad light with the refugees”’.Footnote 61 Education constituted another battleground; the AFSC’s efforts to continue and expand refugee schools, which displaced refugees as well as local Gazan educators had established in camps like Al Maghazy almost immediately after the wartime expulsions, were subject to significant UN constraints on content and reluctance to provide resources. Indeed, UNRPR actively refused to provide funds for the AFSC’s schooling programme, which had to scrounge for its continuation by begging for donations from private organizations, having refugees make their own classroom furniture, and reallocating tents and food to classroom construction.Footnote 62
Most centrally of all, the AFSC insisted over and over in its exchanges with UNRPR that basic material aid must not constitute the international community’s primary response to Palestinian displacement.Footnote 63 The agency put its case bluntly to its international overseers: ‘It is obvious that prolonged direct relief contributes to the moral degeneration of the refugees; and that it may also by its palliative effects militate against a swift political settlement of the problem.’Footnote 64 As time wore on and they spent their energy, money, and political capital on restricting rations lists and downgrading calorie counts, some AFSC members in Gaza came to doubt the basic good intentions behind these schemes. Instead, they became increasingly convinced that they had been recruited into a UN plan to replace political action with a minimal but long-term provision of material aid, an approach to mass displacement that could not finally be understood as benevolent.
They also found that as these tasks were being institutionalized as internationalist best practices, resistance to such UN orders was supremely difficult to maintain. As anthropologist Ilana Feldman puts it, ‘That the AFSC found itself acting in ways that often seemed to contradict its own principles further highlights the radiating effects of the international refugee regime.’Footnote 65 Already, it seemed that the containment, documentation, and minimization that the AFSC found so objectionable had become the only mechanisms through which internationalists were willing to provide refugee aid—an approach that seemed worse, to some workers, than doing nothing at all. Howard Wriggins reflected this disillusionment in an interview decades later: ‘Had I known what I know now about what happened to the folks who fled to the camps in Gaza, I wouldn’t have had anything to do with it.’Footnote 66
The withdrawal
In spring of 1949, in light of the ongoing brutal conditions in Gaza and with no evidence of any political progress, the AFSC opened negotiations with the UN over a possible short-term extension of their agreement. Meeting with members of the UNCCP in March, AFSC members heard a straightforward message: ‘The Conciliation Commission finds itself at an impasse’, with no solution in sight and refugee needs ever-growing.Footnote 67 Though the conversation remained polite for the time being, an AFSC meeting with the UNRPR director Stanton Griffis in early April 1949 recorded fundamental disagreements about the relief effort’s purpose, tactics, and time frame.
The dissatisfaction ran both ways. The AFSC, Griffis told its representatives, was demonstrating ‘tremendous devotion’ but ‘had not kept very good accounts’ and ‘had no idea how much stuff [they] had in the warehouse at any time’. He further expressed reservations about the organization’s dispersal of their supplies: ‘Griffis said that we should not feed the refugees too much as then they would never want to move.’Footnote 68 The AFSC representatives, for their part, pressed Griffis on outcomes: ‘We asked him what he thought might be done about repatriation or resettlement, but he refused to make any comment on this matter … it was not his business and … it was too much of a controversial and political issue for him.’Footnote 69 At another meeting the same month, AFSC representative Howard Wriggins reiterated his concerns in more specific language. ‘We emphasized the importance we attach to receiving firmer assurances than we have yet received to the effect that really serious efforts are being made to find some kind of long-run solution for these refugees’, he declared. ‘We expressed the view that if the agencies too willingly agreed to carry on the relief responsibility, United Nations and member-Governments would feel less pressure actively to pursue such long-range solutions.’Footnote 70
For the moment the agreement was extended into the autumn, with the AFSC extracting a commitment from the UNRPR not to allow daily calorie rations to fall below 1,500.Footnote 71 But internal discussions of the AFSC position in Gaza became more anguished as the UN’s plans to institutionalize refugee relief for a longer term started to come into focus. At a meeting in July, AFSC members tried to come to terms with what they were doing in Palestine. ‘I still feel’, one said, ‘that we are guilty of contributing to a problem that we hope is temporary and making it permanent as long as we go ahead.’ Another pointed out that the AFSC’s still unmet conditions of participation had been clear from the beginning:
We said to Trygve Lie that we would, in effect, give the UN the chance of proving its contention that the end of dole was in sight. We said that if by the end of December there were not concrete plans, the money to carry them out and evidence that they would go into operation in a short time, we would not go on. We got all that we thought we could get in the way of evidence that these plans were being fashioned and that by the end of December the plans would be under way, public property, so that the world will know that they are going on.Footnote 72
Another added regretfully, ‘Our contribution to date has been nil or at least not what we want. … We fear we are being used as a political tool.’Footnote 73
It was perhaps important that the AFSC, in debating the conditions of its withdrawal, did not judge that its decision would result in the total cessation of services in Gaza. This had been the express position of other agencies; as the Commissioner of the League of Red Cross Societies put it, ‘there will be a vacuum without any prospects for further relief … if no scheme for re-establishment is envisaged’.Footnote 74 But the AFSC understood the political realities of the situation differently. ‘The UN does not dare to pull out at the end of December’, Colin Bell told the assembly. Another member agreed: ‘I think that it is a mistake [to assume] that if we withdraw the people would starve.’Footnote 75 In fact, by the end of the summer the AFSC’s position explicitly recognized the likelihood of a long-term internationalist regime in which they would refuse to take part. ‘The Service Committee would be deeply disturbed’, as one correspondent put it, ‘about continuing in an operation wherein the refugees become permanent displaced persons.’Footnote 76 In other words, the Friends had now come to think that their role was not delivering aid that no one else would provide but enacting and legitimizing a long-term plan to maintain ‘order’ in Palestine and its surrounds and permanently silencing the political claims of the refugees.
This worry became more concrete in August of 1949 when the UNCCP established something it called the Economic Survey Mission, charging a former Tennessee Valley Authority director named Gordon Clapp with conjuring a comprehensive plan to incorporate Palestinian refugees into a broader economic vision for the post-war Middle East. In essence, the ‘Clapp report’ took repatriation off the table in favour of quietly resettling as many displaced Palestinians as possible in jobs elsewhere in the region (particularly in American-backed developmentalist projects across Syria and Jordan) while leaving the camp system in place. ‘The administration of the relief and public works programme for refugees … can, in the considered judgment of the Economic Survey Mission’, the report declared, ‘become a contributing factor for peace and economic stability in the Near East’.Footnote 77 Such proposals, as two AFSC observers put it, ‘pave the way for eventual absorption of the refugees in the Arab states but do not fully commit these states to such a move’Footnote 78 —an approach many in the AFSC found both politically unpalatable and practically impossible. ‘The weaknesses of this resettlement scheme are rather obvious’, wrote one. ‘Thousands of refugees will continue to live in the camps at Gaza for years, and there will be a “hard core” of unemployables and indigents left from now on.’Footnote 79 At the UNRPR, by contrast, the report was welcome; it solidified and legitimized the organization’s premise that refugee assistance should serve as a medium- to long-term mode of helping to ‘order’ and modernize a regional economic and political landscape, and its conclusions dovetailed particularly with what one UNRPR field director described as ‘our attack upon the illusory idea that the world owes the Arab Refugees a living’.Footnote 80 By the summer of 1949 UNRPR was promoting what it called ‘work relief projects’ by offering participants remuneration in extra food rations, to the tune of ‘a further 600 calories in animal protein at a cost to UNRPR of $4.50 per worker per month’.Footnote 81 It was a development that pointed the way towards the establishment of a more permanent UN body to deal with the Palestinians: the aptly named United Nations Relief and Works Administration, otherwise known as UNRWA.
The realization of the Clapp commission’s operational assumptions, and UNRPR’s broad acceptance of them, finally put paid to the AFSC’s hopes for a different kind of work in Palestine. By October, the agency was informing the UN that it would not be extending its agreements further. ‘There is a general and very strong feeling among the group here that we should not continue the programme’, AFSC field director Charles Reed wrote in the autumn of 1949. ‘We are definitely planning that no Quakers will be here administering the food and tent programme beyond 31st March.’Footnote 82
Epilogue: The rise of UNRWA
The AFSC was quite right: the end of their Gaza enterprise marked a beginning, rather than an end, of the professional relief regime in Palestine. In December of 1949, at the recommendation of the UNCCP, the UN created the agency that would run refugee operations in Gaza, and elsewhere in the Middle East, for the next seven decades and counting.Footnote 83 The resolution establishing UNRWA thanked the AFSC:
for the contribution they have made to this humanitarian cause by discharging, in the face of great difficulties, the responsibility they voluntarily assumed for the distribution of relief supplies and the general care of the refugees; and welcomes the assurance they have given the Secretary-General that they will continue their co-operation with the United Nations until the end of March 1950 on a mutually acceptable basis.
It was a disingenuous compliment, for the establishment of UNRWA institutionalized the admittedly inchoate and often uncertain principles established during the UNRPR’s antagonistic negotiations with the AFSC and represented a near-total repudiation of the AFSC’s vision of short-term aid designed to support a political process of Palestinian repatriation or resettlement.
Its official mandate was twofold: ‘To carry out in collaboration with local governments the direct relief and works programmes as recommended by the Economic Survey Mission; [and] (b) To consult with the interested Near Eastern Governments concerning measures to be taken by them preparatory to the time when international assistance for relief and works projects is no longer available.’Footnote 84 It would be funded primarily by the United States, whose State Department had a very clear rationale for American involvement: ‘to prevent political upheaval caused by the refugee population’.Footnote 85 The role of UNRWA, then, differed dramatically from how AFSC operators had understood their purpose: not to provide succour while plans for resettlement and recompense were negotiated, but to keep order through the carefully delimited provision of material assistance—without reference to political progress or lack thereof, and with a correspondingly uncertain time horizon. As one AFSC member put it much later:
There was going to be emergency relief and then we were going to leave and everything would be taken care of, all the people would go back home. Somewhere it was realized it was going to be more permanent. Who recognized this permanence so we actually created, I guess UNRWA was the agency that was created … Somebody made the decision that things were sufficiently organized in each of the areas that the United Nations could administer it themselves.Footnote 86
To that end, unsurprisingly, UNRWA’s earliest and most central tasks—like its predecessor’s—centred on definition and documentation. By the early 1950s, the agency had developed the working definition of the ‘Palestine refugee’ that still pertains today: someone entitled to material aid (but not resettlement, asylum, or legal assistance) by virtue of being a person ‘whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict’.Footnote 87 This approach promised nothing in the way of political or legal rights, instead providing solely for a limited degree of material aid from the international sphere until a political solution was found—a time frame that UN officials, both within and outside of UNRWA, well understood was not just around the corner. With the goal of reducing the financial burden on host states to a minimal level, then, UNRWA accepted the UNRPR’s principle that monitoring and enforcing the rolls would be a primary task—now likely extending well beyond the short term. It also continued the earlier agency’s insistence on extraterritorial privileges at the levels of both institution and personnel. ‘UNRWA’s privileges and immunities’, an institutional history would eventually be able to declare, ‘include the maintenance of legal personality, the right to acquire property in its name, immunity from foreign exchange control regulations and taxation, immunity on restrictions on imports for official purposes, and exemption from legal process.’Footnote 88 UNRWA’s documentary responsibilities and extra-state positionality were especially significant because its foundation marked the functional disestablishment of the UNCCP and its mandate to work towards a political solution. From the early 1950s the UNCCP provided little more than an ever-more attenuated effort to detail refugee property losses, and was eventually abandoned though never formally dissolved.Footnote 89 The shrivelling of the UNCCP, and with it the last vestiges of any international will to press for Palestinian return or resettlement, left UNRWA—with its stated ban on political action, its extra-state character, and its commitment to a bare-minimum standard of material assistance—as the institution through which the ‘refugee problem’ would be managed rather than solved.Footnote 90
The UNRWA regime that succeeded the AFSC in Gaza thus operated in a new temporal as well as political frame. In replacing UNRPR and its panoply of private collaborators, UNWRA was to construct a centrally run, internationally controlled, technocratically oriented organization to serve a medium- to long-term holding strategy that might be able to disperse some of the refugees into the surrounding states, but in any case would allow the question of Palestine to drop down the international community’s list of priorities without facing accusations of mass murder or the danger of some form of refugee revolt. Refugees themselves understood UNRWA as anything but temporary. As historian Anne Irfan puts it in her magisterial account of UNRWA, their ‘general opinion of the UN was not only hostile but also mistrustful … many refugees feared that UNWRA’s operations had a furtive political purpose and that it was secretly working to keep them in exile’—evidenced, for instance, in the language of a group of refugee students in Lebanon addressing UNRWA in 1955: ‘you have come to complete the conspiracy and deprive us of any chance to return to our usurped paradise’.Footnote 91 Such expressions were common even among the many Palestinians who came to work for UNRWA as administrators, relief workers, and teachers, and mass opposition to UNRWA’s presence and endeavours was a consistent feature of its early years. (One UN report in 1951 told the General Assembly of all sorts of resistance to UNRWA’s work: ‘demonstrations over the census operation, strikes against the medical and welfare services, strikes for cash payment instead of relief, strikes against making any improvements, such as school buildings, in camps in case this might mean permanent resettlement; experimental houses to replace tents, erected by the Agency, have been torn down’.)Footnote 92 It is perhaps worth noting that as UNRWA gradually abandoned its goals of mass resettlement in the face of unshakeable refugee opposition, it turned towards claiming a new raison d’être that the AFSC had tried to construct in the teeth of UN opposition: education.Footnote 93
But other aspects of its predecessor’s approach, developed against the AFSC’s imaginaries, remained. Even after it had essentially abandoned the idea of resettling Palestinians in scattered employment across other part of the Middle East, UNRWA remained an organization devoted to the containment and management of what had come to be called the refugee problem, primarily via the provision of material assistance. It rapidly developed into an externally run bureaucracy taking on many of the responsibilities of a state (centring the UNRPR’s old interest, refugee documentation) from a position of guaranteed extraterritorial authority. Refugee studies scholar Jamal al-Husseini describes the agency’s evolution as a ‘disciplinary-type “refugee regime”’, whose efforts at containment largely managed ‘to satisfy the competing interests of its stakeholders’—namely, the United States and the Arab host countries.Footnote 94 As the AFSC had come to fear, these were enduring commitments; nearly two decades later it was possible to find the UN describing UNRWA’s work in almost exactly the same language that had pertained in 1949. ‘Should it decide [to extend UNRWA’s mandate]’, the agency’s Commission General, Lawrence Michelmore, told the General Assembly in 1966, it ‘should consider an extension for a reasonably long period, such as five years, in order to avoid difficulties in planning and administration that may lead to unnecessary expenses and inefficiencies.’ He pointed out the now-inalienable bonds between UNRWA and the UN as a body of global governance, working in conjunction with host nation-states to maintain order: ‘The guidance and advice of the General Assembly was essential to enable [UNWRA] to carry out the immediate tasks of assisting the refugees’—not least to face collectively the emerging problem of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), to be dealt with partly by ‘strik[ing] the names of such persons [PLO members] from the Agency’s rolls.’Footnote 95 And it assured that this assistance would display fiscal responsibility by providing assistance to the smallest possible number of people: ‘the host governments had confirmed that they would take effective action in co-operation with the Agency to ensure that the UNRWA services were given only to refugees actually in need’. It was perhaps no surprise that this report clearly assumed UNRWA’s long-term status. ‘Third-generation refugees’, various country representatives agreed, ‘should be given UNRWA assistance.’Footnote 96
***
To return to our original question, then, the AFSC’s records of its brief stint in Gaza reveal its officials’ reluctant and conflicted conclusion that UNRWA’s real purpose was to use material aid not to resolve Palestinian displacement but to render it controllable over a medium to long term. The members of the AFSC involved in Gaza had imagined that refugee assistance would open up space for political negotiation; they came to believe that UNRWA’s operations, by contrast, were basically designed to ensure the maintenance of a regional status quo in which Palestinians would be held in a permanent state of limbo. Whether or not this was a fair conclusion can be debated (though it would help to explain the consistent resistance that UNRWA faced from its supposed beneficiaries in the years following its establishment). What is not in doubt is the way that the basic structures of refugee aid foisted on AFSC workers by their UN overseers—accounting minimal and ever-negotiable levels of need, guaranteeing extraterritorial rights for aid workers, and (above all) documenting and adjudicating refugee status and limiting refugee movement—became core aspects not just of UNWRA practice but of a more general decolonial refugee regime.Footnote 97 The archival record of how early AFSC practitioners came to understand these practices as tools of repression and immobilization rather than assistance and succour therefore also brings into question their purposes in the expansive regime of refugee relief emerging across the decolonizing world after 1945. This is an archive, in other words, that forces historians to join their anthropologist colleagues in considering the possibility that the post-1945 international aid regime was designed, in the first instance, primarily as an exportable mechanism for refugee containment in a post-colonial world.
It also, of course, suggests that there were other ways of imagining refugee assistance: for instance, as the AFSC originally hoped, providing a modest, temporary, and non-institutional form of material aid designed to make space for a displacement-ending diplomatic negotiation and an acknowledgement of the political rights of the expelled. For global historians, then, this story hints at one of the many roads not taken—not just in the history of Palestine/Israel but more generally in twentieth- and twenty-first-century instances of unresolved mass displacements across the world. If nothing else, the AFSC’s objections pointed out the possibility of a refugee aid programme that would neither adjudicate the validity of refugee claims nor use food and shelter as tools to prevent refugee return. But, as the AFSC’s eventual withdrawal from Gaza indicated, the interests of the UN lay in using aid to contain displacement, not to reverse it. The disillusioned AFSC workers turning over their supplies and registration rolls to the newly constituted agency in 1950 would surely have been dismayed, but perhaps not altogether surprised, to hear UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s declaration to the world vis-à-vis an again-destroyed Gaza nearly seventy-five years later: ‘There is no alternative to UNRWA.’Footnote 98
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Don Davis at the American Friends Service Committee Archives in Philadelphia for his generous assistance with this research; to the Harvard International and Global History Seminar and the Portland State History Department Colloquium-Workshop, where I presented earlier versions of this article; to Nathan Citino and Jennifer Dueck for their helpful reading and advice; and to the reviewers and editors of Journal of Global History for their thoughtful suggestions.
Financial support
None to declare.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Laura Robson is Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. Her most recent books are The League of Nations (with Joseph Maiolo, Cambridge University Press, 2025) and Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work (Verso, 2023). She is a co-founder and co-editor of StatelessHistories.org.
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