Post-Colonial Settlement Strategy

Abstract

Settlement projects are sustained clusters of policies that allow states to strategically plan, implement and support the permanent transfer of nationals into a territory not under their sovereignty. Once a common feature of the international system, settlement projects are now rare, and contradict international norms. Yet, these modern projects had been an important feature of some of the longest conflicts of our times, such as Israel-Palestine and Morocco-Western Sahara. Moreover, they had a profound effect on conflicts: they led to their prolongations, affected their levels of violence, patterns of resolution, as well as post-conflict stability. With this significance in mind, the book asks why states launched new settlement projects during the era of decolonization, against common practice and against international norms. The book introduces the international environment as an important enabling variable for the launch of these projects. By drawing comparisons between three such major projects--Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, Morocco in Western Sahara and Indonesia in East-Timor—the book classifies post-colonial settlement projects as a distinct cluster of cases that warrant a different analytical approach to traditional colonial studies, including settler-colonialism approaches. Built on a careful synthesis of existing principles in international relations theory and empirical research, the book advances a clearly formulated theoretical position on the launch of post-colonial settlement projects. The result yields a number of fresh insights into the relationship between conflict, territory and international norms.