Palestinian Rights and the Postcolonial Origins of Refugee Rights
Channel: Simpson Center
Date: 2020-11-19

Ilana Feldman and Pamela Ballinger discuss Palestinian refugee rights and the postcolonial origins of refugee rights.  They explore how refugees—international and internally displaced, recognized and unrecognized by various institutions—shape the political, legal, ethical, and lived worlds of humanitarianism and human rights. Event aired November 12, 2020.

*Learn more about the series:* 
✔ https://www.humanitarianisms.org/​ 

*Clickable Chapter Markers*
00:00 Introduction to series
04:57 Introduction to speakers
6:45 Ilana Feldman, “Humanitarian Rights and Palestinian Presence”
6:55 UNRWA, the West Bank, and the language of rights
8:40 Humanitarian rights, human rights, and national rights
9:12 Palestinian displacement, refugee camps, and refugee politics
10:10 Refugees as rights-bearing and world-forming subjects
11:52 Humanitarian rights and the 1951 Refugee Convention
15:00 Palestinian Refugees shaping UNRWA, acquiring right to protection, demanding right to political life
16:55 Israeli Occupation of Gaza Strip and the limits to politics in humanitarian space
19:56 Concluding remarks
20:55 Introduction: Pamela Ballinger, “Provincializing the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees”
22:45 Italian decolonization, displacement, and humanitarian crisis 
25:17 Ambiguous political status and demands for assistance
26:37 Arab Spring, linkages with new refugee crisis and post-WW2 Italian national refugees
27:30 The coalescence of international refugee regimes 
28:47 Post-war European commitment to colonialism and critiques of the Geneva Convention 
31:30 National refugees’ exclusion from refugee status and erasure of decolonization histories after WW2 
35:35 Colonial versus anti-colonial orders, human rights, and the European refugee regime 
36:36 Concluding remarks 
37:59 Discussian led by Gözde Burcu Ege
47:27 Q&A 

Produced & edited by Simpson Center for the Humanities Program & Events Manager Caitlin Palo; assistance from Simpson Center Communications Manager C.R. Grimmer.

*Full Webinar Credits*
Co-Convened by Professors Arzoo Osanloo (Law, Societies, & Justice; Director, Middle East Center, UW) & Cabeiri Robinson (International Studies, Comparative Religions, & South Asian Studies, UW) 
Moderator: Gözde Burcu Ege (Mellon Sawyer Doctoral Fellow)
Chapter Markings: Mediha P. Sorma (Mellon Sawyer Doctoral Fellow)
Captioning: Sarah Grace Faulk
Poster & Background Graphic Design: Ana Karina Luna 
Intro/Outro Music:  Lobo Loco, “Night at Sahara Dune” on Diversity of Life. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. 
Video Production & Editing by Caitlin Palo 
Video Consultant: C.R. Grimmer

*Description of Ilana Feldman's and Pamela Ballinger's prepared remarks*
In her talk, “Humanitarian Rights and Palestinian Presence,” Ilana Feldman argues that Palestinians have long insisted both that humanitarianisms is a right and that it entails specific obligations. Although the idea of humanitarian rights might seem an oxymoron, Palestinian efforts show that even as such demands may not have the force of law, they have, at least sometimes, been effective in changing practice.

Pamela Ballinger presents a talk entitled “Provincializing the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees.” A rich body of scholarship has highlighted the particularistic and Eurocentric nature of the 1951 Convention. Less studied, however, are the ways in which the refugee definition also excluded many European displaced persons from recognition. Ballinger’s talk recuperates the complex efforts to categorize displacees in the Italian peninsula in the early postwar period, notably migrants produced by Italian decolonization. The Italian case offers an alternative history to the Convention, one that further provincializes (to employ Chakrabarty’s term) the regime of international law and assistance developed around the Convention.

*Speaker bios*
Ilana Feldman is Professor of Anthropology, History, and International Affairs at George Washington University. She is the author of Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics (University of California Press 2018).

Pamela Ballinger is Fred Cuny Chair in the History of Human Rights and Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is author of The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy (Cornell 2020).

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