Overview
Rather than treating the sea as a space of transit, the project approaches it as a set of connected environments, including ports, islands, and coastal zones, where displaced populations are processed and held. The goal is to place the history of refugeedom and the international refugee regime at the intersection of Mediterranean history, environmental approaches to space, international legal history, and critical studies of humanitarianism.
The project draws on the archives of international organizations and humanitarian agencies, including the League of Nations, UNRWA, and major relief organizations, alongside state records, policy documents, and ethnographic materials. Taken together, these sources reconstruct how systems of encampment and control were established and adapted across different historical contexts and across shifting international humanitarian and human rights regimes.
A series of case studies anchors the analysis in specific sites: Armenian refugee camps in port cities such as Beirut and Alexandretta after World War I, the consolidation of Palestinian camps after 1948, post-Cold War evacuation and containment regimes that rely on coastal infrastructures, and the emergence of island-based camps and processing centers in the context of recent migration to Europe.