#inhumanitarianism

No more tunnels, no more fear.
Trump Gaza is finally here.
—Lyrics of “Trump Gaza” video shared by Donald Trump on Truth Social, 25 February 2025 

“Nice Homes”

On September 29, 2025, US President Donald Trump unveiled his “Gaza Peace Plan” at the White House. The plan, which is to serve as the basis of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, includes the creation of a “Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza” that is to be administered by “a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East.” The plan also includes the claim that “Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza.”1 Leaving aside the tensions, if not contradictions, between these provisions of the “peace plan,” this ceasefire arrangement also marks a shift from another vision for Gaza that Trump laid out earlier in 2025—a vision that demonstrates how talk of redevelopment and political futures in Gaza are merged into coincidence.

In infamous comments from early February 2025, Trump proposed the forced displacement of Gaza’s Palestinian residents as the prelude to the US-led reconstruction of Gaza. This reconstruction, “one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth” according to Trump, would yield “the Riviera of the Middle East.”2 This plan’s contravention of international law, embrace of ethnic cleansing, and colonial genealogy were all widely noted. After the plan received no support from Egypt and Jordan, where Trump proposed to house displaced Palestinians, it was abandoned, at least temporarily. Signaling a continued interest in the project, however, Trump shared an AI-generated video fever dream of the proposed “Trump Gaza 2025” on his Truth Social account on February 25, 2025.3

Trump’s displacement plan also referred to and reiterated an accepted and even celebrated humanitarian gesture. Stating that displaced Gazans would be resettled “in nice homes where they can be happy and not be shot and not be killed,” Trump in effect offered architecture to displaced Gazans in the guise of “nice homes,” in exchange for the manifest violation of their rights. A week after his first remarks, Trump made the terms of this exchange explicit. Asked in a Fox News interview if the Palestinians who would be displaced from Gaza would have the right to return to Gaza, Trump replied, “No they wouldn’t. Because they’re going to have much better housing—in other words, I’m talking about building a permanent place for them.”4

The exchange of architecture for rights that Trump proposed for Gaza assumed the form of an absurd and grotesque plan—that Gaza’s Palestinian residents, many of whose families were initially forcibly displaced from their homes during the 1948 war, would be displaced once again, now from the place where they found a most precarious refuge. And yet, the substitution of architecture for rights that formed the basis for Trump’s plan is far from novel. Indeed, precisely this exchange has structured humanitarianism in the neoliberal era and formed the basis for so-called humanitarian design across the globe in recent decades.

Through this exchange, the products of humanitarian design have come to substitute for the recognition of the rights of its supposed beneficiaries. Indeed, the “nice homes” referenced in Trump’s appalling plan for Gaza lay bare an annulment of rights that not only accompany but have even come to solicit humanitarian design. This is why we can understand humanitarian design as a species of what could be called “inhumanitarianism”: a diminution of human rights that presents itself as their advancement. The inhumane dimension of Trump’s proposal to provide “nice homes” to Palestinians forcibly displaced from Gaza was evident, but a similar inhumanity underlies the provision of shelter to refugees and other displaced people in the manifold contemporary contexts where the legal protection of those people is euphemized as physical shelter, and in that way left unrecognized. 

A Global Shelter Imaginary

It may seem provocative to suggest that refugee agencies have, by their own labors, prefigured the inhumanitarianism advanced in Trump’s proposed exchange of rights for architecture. But the products of humanitarian design have come to serve as plenipotentiaries for unrecognized rights in humanitarian government.5

The political rights of refugees, codified in the 1951 Refugee Convention and subsequent protocols, are premised on the universal right to seek asylum. The international refugee protection regime established on the basis of this right has subsequently extended those protections to populations that were not recognized in the original convention. At the heart of these protections is the principle of non-refoulement, which inhibits the return of asylum seekers to the conditions of danger from which they escaped, without first initiating a legal status determination procedure.6 The irony here is that at the very moment in human history when the rights of refugees and asylum seekers were first recognized in this way, numerous signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention had already begun to experiment with ways to preempt the exercise of the same rights.7

The current “migrant crisis” is thus over fifty years old. The Global North began to diminish its humanitarian aid programs to postcolonial states in the 1970s and 1980s, effectively reversing capital flows by imposing structural adjustment policies on much of the Global South.8 Numerous civil wars followed in the wake of these decisions to adjust humanitarianism to the dominant neoliberal political economy. In the wake of these conflicts, humanitarian actors became “administrators of misery,” as refugees who crossed borders and sought protection in camps ended up living in them under conditions of permanent impermanence.

The confusion of humanitarian protection for shelter assistance that followed in the wake of late-twentieth-century displacements has been normalized into ubiquity as the wealthy nations and multinational unions of the Global North have externalized border controls in ways contrary to both the spirit and sometimes the letter of the 1951 Refugee Convention. The result: humanitarian gray zones have proliferated. In these gray zones, refugee camps and detention centers have become places in which architecture has been forcibly exchanged for the deferral of rights—chiefly the right to claim asylum and other sorts of legal protection.9

Australia perfected this strategy of securitizing forced migration. In the early 2000s, Australia leased land on the island nation of Nauru, where it erected detention centers to warehouse asylum seekers interdicted in international waters, thereby preempting their ability to make a legal claim to asylum upon reaching Australian soil.10 Other states have followed suit, with the European Union externalizing border controls in Libya and Turkey and the United Kingdom seeking to do the same via an exchange of asylum seekers for cash with Rwanda. The current effort by the Trump administration to develop a “Migrant Operations Center” at the US military base occupying “leased” land on Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, represents a further extension of these efforts, as the inmates of this center would be migrants—and would-be asylum seekers—who have been removed from US territory.

Inhumanitarian Architecture

Elsewhere across the planet, and most dramatically in the Global South, many people who are denied the right to claim asylum are being presented with an ever-proliferating range of novel architectural proposals that provide them “shelter” in lieu of political solutions to their plight: inflatable dwellings, flat-pack houses, structural weave abodes and schools, cardboard homes, and origami caravans. Through these means, the institution of architecture is evermore emphatically committing itself to providing answers to the wrong question, as the political problem of involuntary migration is being interpreted as a technocratic question of housing. Subsuming the precarious legal standing of refugees and stateless persons within the broader context of “disaster management” and “dignified development” proposals intended to address displaced earthquake and flood victims (within their own states), for example, architecture tacitly participates in marketing improvements in assistance as a substitute for lost protections and rights.

One of the most extreme examples of this tendency is the so-called Better Shelter: a flat-pack Refugee Housing Unit produced in a collaboration between the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the IKEA Foundation. (IKEA is the UNHCR’s largest private sector partner). According to its designers, Better Shelter responds to protracted situations of displacement by “bridging the gap” between temporary shelters provided in post-emergency conditions and so-called durable solutions to forced migration—i.e., resettlement, local integration, or safe repatriation. The continuum between tents and houses is here posed in temporal terms: “[the Better Shelter can be] integrated into transitional shelter programs so that you can extend the lifespan and link the emergency aid you are having here to more development aid.”11 But there is no temporal continuum between shelter provided to displaced people and homes occupied by people with a right to reside in them. Temporary shelters and durable homes are both, in fact, moments in the juridico-political paradox that defines refugee crises to begin with. If the only migration typically available to refugees and other displaced people is an intolerable refoulement, or forced repatriation, to their state of origin, then the only homes available to these people are temporary shelters (whether “better” or not) that meet the political concerns of host states—maintaining the temporary status of asylum seekers in perpetuity rather than “diminishing” their own sovereignty by acceding to the “local integration” of others.12

Any temptation to rationalize this state of affairs on pragmatic grounds runs up against Hannah Arendt’s observation that “those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.”13 As if in demonstration of Arendt’s concerns—and despite (or perhaps because of) an inability to reckon with the political logic of displacement in which it participates—the discipline of architecture is increasingly enjoying museum shows, earning media attention, and giving itself honorary awards for its humanitarian efforts. Here, confirmation bias has become indistinguishable from an exchange of social capital between elite designers and prestige exhibition venues. However well-intentioned designers may be, at an institutional and structural level, there is no other way to explain the politics underlying the presentation of a prototype disaster relief dwelling on the grounds of Philip Johnson’s Glass House or the exhibition of the Better Shelter as the centerpiece of MoMA’s 2016 “Insecurities” exhibition. If, as Gayatri Spivak has argued, “the typecase of the ethical sentiment is regret, not self-congratulation,” then the sentiment prized by the elite design world has not been ethical, but self-satisfaction.14 Uniting all of these efforts is what Lilie Chouliaraki has called “ironic solidarity” to describe forms of engagement with distant suffering that demand pleasurable catharsis in exchange for attention.15

In their unseriousness, these examples of an elite architecture’s proposals for refugee housing reveal themselves to be part of historical trajectory that is as serious as it is troubling. Inhumanitarianism advances itself in the appearance of inhumanity’s sublation. As humanitarian design perpetuates itself on the level of socially necessary appearance, or ideology, suffering is promoted at a structural level. Seen from this standpoint, there is an uncomfortable contiguity between the liberal imagination advanced in the architectural rescue of contemporary refugees and the actual management of what Michel Agier has termed the world’s “undesirables.”16 In humanitarian design, that is, the present social order cares for “undesirables” by not caring for them. What should be attended to with respect to humanitarian design, then, is the invisible but profound translation of humanitarian protection from an issue of rights to an issue of shelter. When the central question provoked around humanitarianism becomes a question of how refugees and other displaced people should be sheltered, the question of how to protect the rights of these people is at once deferred and obscured.

Postscript: “Communicating Humanitarian Shelter”

Inhumanitarianism is learned. It requires a pedagogy. In the winter of 2024, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) announced its intentions to host a design charrette entitled “Communicating Humanitarian Shelter” at the Association’s annual conference in March 2025. Cosponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Organization on Migration (IOM), the charrette was intended to “challenge students to design an exhibit that engages the public’s understanding of the need for humanitarian shelter to support the world’s most vulnerable people.”17 Many of the “most vulnerable people” referred to in the charrette’s description are vulnerable precisely because their rights have been unrecognized or ignored. There is no possible design solution to the annulment of rights that yields that vulnerability. To search for such a solution in this way is to prolong their annulment, to render their annulment ever more unthinkable, and to further anesthetize architecture’s political imagination.

Since the call for participation in the “Communicating Humanitarian Shelter” charrette was issued, the Trump administration largely neutralized its two main sponsors. Through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the administration has eradicated USAID “in all but name,” leaving only fifteen civil servants to staff what had been a department of 10,000 people.18 Under its “Project Homecoming,” the administration has also sought to recruit the IOM in effecting the “self-deportation” (or “assisted voluntary return”) of undocumented migrants and potential asylum seekers currently living on US soil.19 ACSA, the third sponsor, self-neutralized in prophylactic fashion, calling off the charrette and, in a decision that has been interpreted as further evidence of the association’s capitulation to the politics of President Trump, also canceled the publication of a forthcoming issue of its flagship publication, the Journal of Architectural Education, dedicated to Palestine.20

It would be tempting to interpret this turn of events as an allegory of architecture’s own failure, in the sense that inhumanitarianism—the extorted substitution of roofs for rights—proves to have been complicit with what it sought to undo all along, and ends up betrayed by that betrayal. In the ersatz rights talk of institutions like the ACSA, one witnesses the eventual affirmation of rightlessness that would follow when President Trump proposed “nice homes” for Gaza’s Palestinians. Gaza, in sum, has killed the usual story about rights that has been maintained by an entire generation of architects. This has left architecture’s institutions to either act approvingly or indifferently to the horror that a “nice homes” agenda entails, cling to inhumanitarian fictions, or end once and for all the politics of apoliticism that lies barely below the surface of the roofs it promotes as plenipotentiaries for rights.

But if inhumanitarianism requires a pedagogy, then it can also be unlearned.