refugees

How do bureaucracies pattern durable inequalities? Predominant approaches emphasize the role of administrative categories, which prioritize certain populations for valued resources based on broader regimes of human worth. This article extends this body of work by examining how categorical inequalities become embedded within administrative infrastructures and institutional pathways. I develop this argument through a case study of the United States’ refugee resettlement program.

Although the Refugee Convention and European asylum legislation state that decisions regarding asylum applications should be determined solely based on persecution and other human rights violations, the outcomes of asylum procedures may be subject to socioeconomic selectivity. This article is the first to analyse whether the human and social capital of asylum-seekers affect the results of decisions regarding their asylum applications and the length of asylum procedures based on a comprehensive longitudinal survey of 5,300 refugees in Germany.

This paper addresses the recognition in cosmopolitan debate of a possible disjuncture between the normative ideal of cosmopolitanism and its realization in practice. Taking as its focus the potential conflict between human rights commitments and national concern about immigration control, it reflects on a series of legal challenges to UK government attempts to withdraw support from asylum seekers who do not claim on entry into the country.

Famine Relief in Warlord China is a reexamination of disaster responses during the greatest ecological crisis of the pre-Nationalist Chinese republic. In 1920–1921, drought and ensuing famine devastated more than 300 counties in five northern provinces, leading to some 500,000 deaths. Long credited to international intervention, the relief effort, Pierre Fuller shows, actually began from within Chinese social circles.

Since the 1970s, tens of thousands of Vietnamese immigrants have settled in Louisiana, Florida, and other Gulf Coast states, rebuilding lives that were upended by the wars in Indochina. For many, their faith has been an essential source of community and hope. But how have their experiences as migrants influenced their religious practices and interpretations of Buddhist tenets? And how has organized religion shaped their understanding of what it means to be Vietnamese in the United States?

Ariella Azoulay revises our understanding of the ethical status of photography. It must, she insists, be understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history. She argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals and the powers that govern them and, at the same time, a form of relations among equals that constrains that power. Anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph’s addressee, is or can become a member of the citizenry of photography.

In 2014, the arrest and detention of thousands of desperate young migrants at the southwest border of the United States exposed the U.S. government's shadowy juvenile detention system, which had escaped public scrutiny for years. This book tells the story of six Central American and Mexican children who are driven from their homes by violence and deprivation, and who embark alone, risking their lives, on the perilous journey north. They suffer coercive arrests at the U.S.

This remarkable debut book from Philip Gourevitch chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Gourevitch his title.

Palestinian refugees’ experience of protracted displacement is among the lengthiest in history. In her breathtaking new book, Ilana Feldman explores this community’s engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts to alter their present and future conditions. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic field research, Life Lived in Relief offers a comprehensive account of the Palestinian refugee experience living with humanitarian assistance in many spaces and across multiple generations.

Anna Seghers's Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight. Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers's multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille.