The REF-ARAB Project - Team - Benjamin White
Benjamin Thomas White teaches at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. A Middle East historian by background, he now teaches and researches the history of refugees in the world since the late nineteenth century.
Ben’s research on refugee history initially grew out of an interest in the relationship between refugees and state formation in the Middle East. In his first article on the subject, ‘Refugees and the definition of Syria, 1920-1939’, he showed that the post-Ottoman nation-state of Syria was formed around and against the displaced people who sought refuge there, in terms of its territory, its institutions (including nationality), and its national identity. The aftermath of the first world war in the Middle East also witnessed an early example of a humanitarian evacuation—a practice that only became politically thinkable and logistically practicable in those years of mass displacement and mass military mobilization, as he argued in an article in Humanity.
Military techniques were also applied to humanitarian ends at the refugee camp that the British army set up at Baquba near Baghdad in 1918, Ben’s first case study for a project on the global history of the refugee camp. His research on Baquba also prompted an ongoing investigation of the complex but little-studied role that animals play in situations of human displacement. An article he wrote for Journal of Refugee Studies shows how the animals of the camp shaped the lives of the refugees living there, while a special feature he coordinated for Forced Migration Review, funded by the Wellcome Trust, contains seven short articles with a contemporary focus that consider this subject from a range of academic and practitioner perspectives. Ben also writes regularly about present-day refugee issues, for a general audience as well as an academic one.
For REF-ARAB he will be exploring a historical conundrum:
Why did several Arab states that only belatedly, or never, signed the 1951 Refugee Convention play an active role in its drafting?