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.