This book argues that the international refugee regime and its 'temporary' humanitarian interventions have failed. Most refugees across the global live in 'protracted' conditions that extend from years to decades, without legal status that allows them to work and establish a home. It is contended that they become largely invisible to people based in the global North, and cease to remain fully human subjects with access to their political lives. Shifting the conversation away from the salient discourse of 'solutions' and technical fixes within state-centric international relations, the authors recover the subjectivity lost for those stuck in extended exile.
The book first argues that humanitarian assistance to refugees remains vital to people's survival, even after the emergency phase is over. It then connects asylum politics in the global North with the intransigence of extended exile in the global South. By placing the urgent crises of protracted exile within a broader constellation of power relations, both historical and geographical, the authors present research and empirical findings gleaned from refugees in Iran, Kenya and Canada and from humanitarian and government workers. Each chapter reveals patterns of power circulating through the 'colonial present', Cold War legacies, and the global 'war on terror".
Seeking to render legible the more quotidian struggles and livelihoods of people who find themselves defined as refugees, this book will be of great interest to international humanitarian agencies, as well as migration and refugee researchers, including scholars in refugee studies and human displacement, human security, globalization, immigration, and human rights.
Jennifer Hyndman is a Professor in Social Science and Geography at York University in Toronto, where she is also Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies. Her research focuses on the geopolitics of forced migration, the biopolitics of refugee camps, humanitarian responses to war and displacement, and resettlement policy and outcomes in North America. Hyndman is author of Dual Disasters: Humanitarian Aid after the 2004 Tsunami (2011), Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and co-editor with Wenona Giles of, Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones (University of California Press, 2004). Before taking an academic path, Hyndman worked briefly for the NGO CARE in Kenya and UNHCR in Somalia where she developed an intense affinity for the politics of displacement.
Wenona Giles is a Resident Research Associate of the Centre for Refugee Studies and Professor, Anthropology Department, York University, where she teaches and publishes in the areas of gender, forced migration, globalization, migration, nationalism, and war. In addition to many articles, her books include Immigration and Nationalism: Two Generations of Portuguese Women in Toronto (University of Toronto Press 2002), co-edited publications: Development and Diaspora: Gender and the Refugee Experience (Artemis, 1996); a two-volume issue of Refuge on Gender Relations and Refugee Issues (1995), and a co-edited issue of Refuge on Higher Education for Refugees (2010-11); co-edited books, Feminists under Fire: Exchanges across War Zones (Between the Lines Press, Toronto 2003), Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones (with Jennifer Hyndman and published at University of California Press, 2004) and When Care Work Goes Global: Locating the Social Relations of Domestic Work (with Mary Romero and Valerie Preston, Ashgate 2014). She co-founded and co-coordinated the International Women in Conflict Zones Research Network (1993-2004). She is currently the Director of a multi-year project (2013-18) funded by the Canadian Government that brings degree programs from Kenyan and Canadian universities to refugees in the Dadaab refugee camps, Kenya.
