« The familiar settler colonialism of family science: Theresa J. Ambo, Stephen M. Gavazzi, ‘Family science, land-grant universities, and the daunting legacy of the land-grab institution, Journal of Family Theory & Review, 2024
With a chapter on the Irish settler diaspora: Ciaran O’Neill, Power and Powerlessness in Union Ireland: Life in a Palliative State, Oxford University Press, 2024 »

The humanitarian legacy of settler colonial transfer: Pietro Stefanini, ‘Settler-Humanitarianism: Dispossession, “Humanitarian Transfer” and the 1948 Nakba’, Millennium, 2024

21Nov24

Abstract: This article revisits the history of the 1948 Nakba and suggests that hitherto literature has not explored in depth how the racialised liberal world order has come to bear on settler colonial strategies of dispossession. It was the international relations practice of ‘population exchanges’ that afforded a humanitarian operational logic to structure the mass expulsion of Palestinians in the name of creating a racially homogenous nation-state. The article shows how the idea of humanitarian population transfers was debated in the 1930s – particularly after the proposals of the 1937 British Peel Commission – and later a settler colonial form of humanitarianism was mobilised amid warfare in 1948, first to concentrate Palestinians internally inside enclaves, and then to entrench the expulsion of refugees. The conclusion reflects on the ways in which a similar notion of ‘humanitarian transfer’ has re-emerged during the contemporary Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.


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