Books of the decade

Editor's note: Ten years ago, Forced Migration Review (FMR) published a feature entitled “issues of the new millennium” in which eight individuals gave their recommendations for the most significant books of the 1990s. I was interested in soliciting similar recommendations, but for books that have been written since the start of the new millennium instead. Here is the first submission, from Jeff Crisp, Head of UNHCR's Policy Development and Evaluation Service. Information on how to access the books can be found below.

While my two principal books of the decade both provide illuminating and highly readable overviews of the global refugee situation, their style and intended audience are very different.

The Price of Indifference: Refugees and Humanitarian Action in the New Century (Oxford University Press, 2002) was written by the late Arthur Helton, just a year before his tragic death in the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad. Helton’s objective is an ambitious one – to make some sense of the complex interplay between international politics and humanitarian action in the years that followed the end of the Cold War, a period when millions of people throughout the world were uprooted by communal conflicts, genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Targeted primarily at the policymaking and academic communities, the book draws on Helton’s first-hand experience of humanitarian crises and mass population displacements throughout the world and calls on the international community (and more specifically the USA) to ‘imagine better refugee policy’.

Arguing that ‘the current system for international humanitarian action is fundamentally flawed’, Helton goes on to suggest that ‘refugee policy should surely be more than the administration of misery’, and sets out his vision for an alternative approach, based on the notion of ‘proactive and preventive action’. In this context, it is not difficult to imagine how Helton would have viewed the failure of states to anticipate the violence and mass displacements that took place in Iraq in the years that followed his untimely demise in that country.

Written for a much broader audience, Caroline Moorehead’s Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees (Chatto and Windus, 2005) is journalism of the very highest quality. Based on visits to war zones, refugee camps, prisons and detention centres throughout the world, Moorehead’s highly readable book combines the stories of individual refugees and asylum seekers with a historical account of the way that states, international organizations and NGOs have responded to the plight of the displaced.

Whether describing the life of Liberian refugees in Cairo, an Iranian detained in Australia, Mexicans who are hoping to cross the border into the USA or a Palestinian who has lived in exile for more than 50 years, Moorehead’s book provides an extremely effective riposte to those politicians who are unable to utter the word ‘refugee’ or ‘asylum seeker’ without adding the adjective ‘bogus’. Human Cargo should be compulsory reading for all border guards, immigration officials, asylum adjudicators – and UNHCR staff members.

I particularly enjoyed reading four other books, all of which succeed in enhancing our understanding of refugee and asylum issues, while simultaneously conveying the harsh and human reality of displacement.

Cindy Horst’s, Transnational Nomads: How Somalis Cope with Refugee Life in the Dadaab Camps of Kenya (Berghahn Books, 2006) provides an excellent example of contemporary anthropology, mercifully free of the impenetrable post-modernism that now plagues this academic discipline. It is by far the best account of what has become known as a ‘protracted refugee situation’ and is especially incisive in analyzing the extensive social networks that link the apparently isolated residents of Dadaab to Somali communities in Nairobi and the wider world.

Peter Showler draws upon his extensive experience as Chair of the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board to uncover the truth about refugee status determination procedures in Refugee Sandwich: Stories of Exile and Asylum (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006). Based on 13 fictional (but fact-based) vignettes, the book lives up to the publisher’s claim that it ‘tells us more about Canada’s refugee system than any academic treatise’. A book that stands out for its humanity, originality and sense of irony.

I read Behzad Yaghmaian’s fascinating Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West (Random House, 2006) from cover to cover in a single sitting. Focusing on the movement of asylum seekers and migrants from countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Sudan, the book provides a gripping and often heart-wrenching account of their efforts to find safety in Europe, focusing particularly on their tough treatment in transit countries such as Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey.

David Corlett’s moving volume Following Them Home: The Fate of the Returned Asylum Seekers (Black Inc. Books, 2005), has been curiously neglected by both the refugee studies and advocacy communities. Travelling to countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Thailand, Corlett examines the plight of unsuccessful asylum seekers who have been returned from Australia, often after a prolonged period of detention. The book provides an extremely persuasive indictment of Australia’s asylum policy under the Howard administration and remains highly relevant to the uncertain fate of ‘rejected cases’ in the industrialized states.

Jeff Crisp
Head, Policy Development and Evaluation Service
UNHCR

Access details:

The Price of Indifference: Refugees and Humanitarian Action in the New Century (OUP, 2002)
- Publisher info
- Google Books preview
- Amazon
- Find the book in a library

Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees (Chatto and Windus, 2005)
- Publisher info
- Google Books preview
- Amazon
- Find the book in a library

Transnational Nomads: How Somalis Cope with Refugee Life in the Dadaab Camps of Kenya (Berghahn Books, 2006)
- Publisher info
- Google Books preview
- Amazon
- Find the book in a library

Refugee Sandwich: Stories of Exile and Asylum (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006)
- Publisher info
- Amazon
- Find the book in a library

Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West (Random House, 2006)
- Publisher info
- Amazon
- Find the book in a library

Following Them Home: The Fate of the Returned Asylum Seekers (Black Inc. Books, 2005)
- Publisher info
- Find the book in a library

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