Post-Colonial Settlement Strategy

Explores the motivations behind contemporary (post-1960) settlement projects into occupied territories

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. Ehud Eiran explains why states launch settlement projects into occupied areas and introduces the international environment as an important enabling variable. By drawing comparisons between three such major projects--Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, Morocco in Western Sahara and Indonesia in East-Timor--Ehud Eiran classifies post-colonial settlement projects as a distinct cluster of cases that warrant a different analytical approach to traditional colonial studies.

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.

Ehud (Udi) Eiran is Assistant Professor at the School of Political Science, University of Haifa. Eiran is a graduate of Tel-Aviv, Cambridge and Brandeis Universities, and held research appointments at Harvard Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School. He was also a visiting lecturer at MIT's Department of Political Science. Prior to his academic career, Eiran served as Assistant to the Foreign Policy Advisor to Israel's Prime Minister.