Refugees or labour migrants? From the Middle East to the world, 1920s-2020s

Victoria Abrahamyan (Université de Neuchâtel)
Refugees, citizens or natives? The case of Armenian refugees in the French mandatory Syria, 1920-1932

On 26 August 1926, when the report of George Burnier—the representative of the International Red Cross in Beirut—arrived in Geneva, it raised more concern than satisfaction. It reported that ‘the personal status issue of the Armenian refugees in Syria and Lebanon is definitely solved… they had automatically become citizens’. Raymond Schlemmer exclaimed in horror, ‘This is impossible! If there are not stateless refugees, it would be very difficult… to justify a financial aid to them and ‘toute notre affaire tombera à l’eau’. A few months earlier, the legal status of the refugees had been finally adopted, which applied only to the Russian and the Ottoman Armenian refugees. When Syrians complained against the French decision to grant the Armenian refugees citizenship, they argued that Armenians were ‘guests’ and could not be considered equal citizens. Armenians, on the other hand, were astonished to be called ‘guests’: ‘how one can be called a ‘guest’ in one’s own home? Were not we Ottoman subjects with the Syrians? Did not we come from the regions of the former Ottoman Aleppo?’ This paper will discuss the controversial Armenian refugee experience in Syria.

Laura Robson (Penn State University)
The M-Project: the Middle Eastern origins of the refugee-labor migrant nexus

This paper explores how the Middle East played a central role in shaping an internationalist strategy to solve the problem of mass displacement by transforming the modern world’s refugee populations into a global pool of migrant industrial labor. It focuses on the history of the secret “Migration Project,” undertaken by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration in the last years of WWII, which proposed an imperially inflected scheme to identify “empty” spaces around the globe—from Iraq to Argentina to South Africa—where racially undesirable refugee populations might be settled as migrant labor in a variety of externally owned capitalist enterprises, from industrial agriculture to oil extraction. During this period, the Middle East in particular came to serve as a kind of laboratory for remaking refugees as mobile labor pools, a process that was supported in the internationalist realm through the development of a body of international law redefining displaced populations as voluntary participants in industrial development schemes across the globe. This paper, then, begins to offer a history of the contemporary phenomenon of “solving” the problems presented by political refugees by recasting them as migratory workers in an international capitalist labor market – a project whose appeal remains undimmed today despite its many and myriad historical failures.

Ann Zuntz (University of Edinburgh)

An alternative history of Syrian displacement, as told by the shaweesh

“Poverty is black—if you don’t work, you will go hungry”, explains a Syrian labour contractor, a so-called shaweesh, who employs pregnant Syrian women in the olive harvest in Lebanon. Taking the point of view of the shaweesh, this paper tells an alternative history of displacement in the Middle East: not as a humanitarian crisis, but as a process that produces the mobile and cheap workforces that agriculture requires. The shaweesh mediates exploitative relationships between Syrians and employers, but he is also often refugees’ next of kin. This makes his perspective a unique entry point to understanding how refugees become trapped in a chronic cycle of poverty through labour. The mundane aftermath of displacement may be absent from written archives, but this paper find its traces in cultivated landscapes, on workers’ bodies, and in family memories of the shaweesh. It draws on interviews with labour contractors in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, conducted for the Refugee labour under lockdown project in 2020/21. Instead of exceptionalising refugees, this paper includes them into an analysis of how marginalised people are drawn into increasingly globalised economies – and tells the affective, embodied and environmental histories that displaced labour creates.

Please note that bookings will close 24 hours in advance, so that seminar convenors can distribute the meeting link directly to all registered attendees.

This event is based on discussion of short pre-circulated papers. Please contact the seminar convenors to request copies: [email protected]