About

Pamela Ballinger is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, where she holds the Fred Cuny Chair in the History of Human Rights and serves as the Director of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology & History. She earned her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1999. Her research focuses on human rights, refugees and displacement, memory, fascism, empire and decolonization, as well as seascapes and coastal issues, infrastructure, and the intersections of history and anthropology. Her work often explores Italy and Croatia/ex-Yugoslavia, contributing significantly to the understanding of postwar migration, decolonization, and the history of displacement. She has authored several books, including 'History in Exile' and 'The World Refugees Made,' and has published extensively in academic journals and book chapters, advancing scholarship in her areas of expertise.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• The Routledge Handbook of Peripheries in European Studies

  2026-02-10

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Historical Foundations and Limitations of International Refugee Law

  Annual Review of Law and Social Science · 2025-10-13

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article situates the foundational legal definition of the refugee articulated in the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees and its subsequent 1967 Protocol in historical processes of empire, decolonization, war, and humanitarian mobilization. It critiques international refugee law from the inside out, that is, by taking as axiomatic its European normative origins while simultaneously recognizing the global and polycentric dimensions of the refugee crisis by the early twentieth century. In particular, it draws upon the work of an emerging scholarship on refugee history that reveals the frequently ad hoc, improvisational nature of international refugee law in its formative development, which has made for persistent limitations. Key limitations include the privileging of political, rather than environmental or economic, motivations for migration.

  PublisherDOI

• Revisiting a decade of decadence

  Journal of Modern Italian Studies · 2025-12-22

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• What was fascism?

  Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2024-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In her influential monographs and essays, Katherine Verdery transformed understandings of state socialism and the command economy at its heart. I reflect here on how scholars might similarly reframe understandings of Italian fascism through renewed attention to the infrastructural project so central to fascist governance in both the metropole and overseas possessions. The piece operates in the spirit of Verdery’s critical questioning of Western accounts that overestimated the centralization of power within socialist states. By contrast, the prevailing scholarship on fascist political economy, as well as empire, has stressed its irrationality. A prominent view thus depicts fascist projects of public works and autarchy largely as future-oriented projections (delusions, even) of the Duce or as monuments to failure. By employing an ethnographic sensibility that takes seriously the logics of infrastructure and fascist infrastructural power, the analysis derives inspiration from Verdery’s method of challenging orthodoxies about power in particular state formations.

  PublisherDOI

• Remapping Italy’s Migrant and Migrated Archives: An Agenda

  Italian Culture · 2024-07-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Jewish Displaced Persons in Italy 1943–1951: Politics, Rehabilitation, Identity, by Chiara Renzo

  European Journal of Jewish Studies · 2024-09-09

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 1. Patriation: Conceptualizing Migration after Empire

  Berghahn Books · 2024-08-04

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Refugees as Resources: A Post-War Experiment in European Refugee Relief

  Contemporary European History · 2024-05-31

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores the Homeless European Land Program, an experiment in resettling foreign refugees in post-Second World War Sardinia undertaken by two idealistic Americans with the support of the Brethren Service Committee and the fledgling UNHCR. Focusing on individuals rejected for immigration, the initiative aimed to integrate these ‘hard core’ refugees by rendering them agents of development of a ‘backwards’ region of the Italian South and to overcome Italian reluctance to serve as a country of permanent resettlement for the displaced. The history of this project reveals the contradictory impulses of early Cold War refugee relief and humanitarianism: the competition between intergovernmental and voluntary agencies, of secular and spiritual enterprises, and of images of refugees as dependent and difficult to settle and yet capable of self-sufficiency. Many of the ideas piloted in Sardinia, notably the linking of self-sufficiency and development, later became prominent in the UNHCR's work in the Global South.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy

  2023 · 26 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law

  In The World Refugees Made, Pamela Ballinger explores Italy's remaking in light of the loss of a wide range of territorial possessions in Africa and the Balkans (colonies, protectorates, and provinces), the repatriation of Italian nationals from those territories, and the integration of these "national refugees" into a country devastated by war and overwhelmed by foreign displaced persons from Eastern Europe. Post-World War II Italy served as an important laboratory, in which categories differentiating foreign refugees (who had crossed national boundaries) from national refugees (those who presumably did not) were debated, refined, and consolidated. Such distinctions resonated far beyond that particular historical moment, informing legal frameworks that remain in place today. Offering an alternative genealogy of the postwar international refugee regime, Ballinger focuses on the consequences of one of its key omissions: the ineligibility from international refugee status of those migrants who became classified as national refugees.The presence of displaced persons also posed the complex question of who belonged, culturally and legally, in an Italy that was territorially and politically reconfigured by decolonization. The process of demarcating types of refugees thus represented a critical moment for Italy, one that endorsed an ethnic conception of identity that citizenship laws made explicit. Such an understanding of identity remains salient, as Italians still invoke language and race as bases of belonging in the face of mass immigration and ongoing refugee emergencies. Ballinger's analysis of the postwar international refugee regime and Italian decolonization illuminates the study of human rights history, humanitarianism, postwar reconstruction, fascism and its aftermaths, and modern Italian history

  PublisherOA PDF

• “Our Adriatic”: Comment on Forum on Adriatic Tourism

  Austrian History Yearbook · 2023-04-19

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This short piece comments on the articles presented in the forum on Adriatic tourism and their analyses of competing historical claims to “our Adriatic.” The comment focuses on questions raised about ownership of the sea and the Adriatic's borders of belonging. While sovereignty over areas of the Adriatic has proven an enduring diplomatic issue in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the forum authors instead consider claims by different types of actors: tourists (particularly Czech tourists who claimed a special relationship between Czechs and their South Slav “brothers”); investors in hotels and related infrastructure; socialist Yugoslav tourism planners; and environmentalists concerned with issues of pollution. In tracing out tensions in the agendas of hosts and visitors, as well as planners and scientists, the forum's essays measure and map the socio-ecological metabolism of the modern eastern Adriatic.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Tamara Zelinski

  Tel Aviv University

  9 shared

• David Douglas

  9 shared

• C. De Bac

  9 shared

• Jay H. Hoofnagle

  National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases

  9 shared

• Eugene R. Schiff

  University of Miami

  9 shared

• Michael R. Lucey

  9 shared

• Teresa L. Wright

  California State University, Long Beach

  9 shared

• Ren Chao

  Princeton University

  4 shared