Human Capital

Laura Robson is the Oliver-McCourtney Professor of History at Penn State University and a recent Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. She has written and edited five books on Middle Eastern and global history, including most recently The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East (2020) and Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth Century Territorial Separatism (with Arie Dubnov, 2019). She is co-founder and co-editor of StatelessHistories.org.

• Introduction: Refugees, Workers1. What's a Refugee Regime? The Origins of Mass Displacement Policy2. Turning a Profit: Refugee Policy at the League of Nations3. Colonial Workers: Expanding the Refugee Regime4. From Europe to America: Refugees and the Politics of "Overpopulation"5. Zionism Goes Global: Refugees and Roosevelt's M Project6. Workers of Another World: Soviet Resettlement Policy7. Refugees versus "Palestine Refugees": Race and the Postwar International Regime8. The Politics of Confinement: Refugee Aid in the Age of Decolonization9. Containing Labor: Refugees, Migrants, SEZsAfterword: Workers, RefugeesAcknowledgementsNotesIndex

Laura Robson reframes the history of international refugee policy, showing that security questions and labor needs have always been at its center. The story she tells is not only about the past but is vital for understanding responses to displacement today.