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145 books match the query 'Refugees' and 4 start with o

cover of Occupied Refuge: Humanitarian Colonization and the Camp in Kenya

Occupied Refuge

Humanitarian Colonization and the Camp in Kenya

Hanno Brankamp

Duke University Press, 2026

In a world shaped by war, climate disaster, and displacement, refugee camps are imagined as indispensable safe havens for millions of people fleeing crises. In Occupied Refuge, Hanno Brankamp challenges the presumed innocence of refugee humanitarianism as a system of civilian protection that can manage global inequalities and forced migration by peaceful means. He shows that although humanitarian missions aim to protect displaced populations in the global South, they often function as militarized occupations that treat camp inhabitants as new colonized subjects. Through ethnographic research in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, Brankamp demonstrates how aid operations rely on a combination of infrastructural expansion, militarized policing, ethno-racial subjugation, indirect rule, and economic extraction. By co-managing these camps with international aid agencies, the Kenyan state becomes not only a willing accomplice in planetary humanitarian containment but seeks to pacify its own peripheral territories, securitize unwanted migrants, and impose national rule. Illuminating how refugee camps serve as key sites where carceral protectionism, postcolonial nation-building, and global mobility control intersect, Brankamp calls for abolitionist futures beyond the violent structures of encampment, borders, and citizenship.
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cover of On the Run in Siberia

On the Run in Siberia

Rane Willerslev

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

If I had let myself be ruled by reason alone, I would surely be lying dead somewhere or another in the Siberian frost.

The Siberian taiga: a massive forest region of roughly 4.5 million square miles, stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Bering Sea, breathtakingly beautiful and the coldest inhabited region in the world. Winter temperatures plummet to a bitter 97 degrees below zero, and beneath the permafrost lie the fossilized remains of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and other ice age giants. For the Yukaghir, an indigenous people of the taiga, hunting sable is both an economic necessity and a spiritual experience—where trusting dreams and omens is as necessary as following animal tracks. Since the fall of Communism, a corrupt regional corporation has monopolized the fur trade, forcing the Yukaghir hunters into impoverished servitude.

Enter Rane Willerslev, a young Danish anthropologist who ventures into this frozen land on an idealistic mission to organize a fair-trade fur cooperative with the hunters. From the outset, things go terribly wrong. The regional fur company, with ties to corrupt public officials, proves it will stop at nothing to maintain its monopoly: one of Willerslev’s Yukaghir business partners is arrested on spurious charges of poaching and illegal trading; another drowns mysteriously. When police are sent to arrest him, Willerslev fears for his life, and he and a local hunter flee to a remote hunting lodge even deeper in the icy wilderness. Their situation turns even more desperate right away: they manage to kill a moose but lose the meat to predators and begin to starve, frostbitten and isolated in the frozen taiga.

Thus begins Willerslev’s extraordinary, chilling tale of one year living in exile among Yukaghir hunters in the stark Siberian taiga region. At turns shocking and quietly moving, On the Run in Siberia is a pulse-pounding tale of idealism, political corruption, starvation, and survival (with a timely assist from Vladimir Putin) as well as a striking portrait of the Yukaghirs’ shamanistic tradition and their threatened way of life, a drama unfolding daily in one of the world’s coldest, most enthralling landscapes.

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cover of One Woman in the War: Hungary 1944-1945

One Woman in the War

Hungary 1944-1945

Alaine Polcz

Central European University Press, 2002

Before the publication of this book, Alaine Polcz was widely recognized as a psychologist ministering to the needs of disturbed and incurably ill children and their families, as the author of numerous articles and several books on thanatology, and as the founder of the hospice movement in Hungary. The autobiographic account of the experiences of a woman, then 19-20, in the closing months of the Second World War. When it was first published, in 1991, the book was a revelation of past horrors in Hungary which, until then, had lingered on in the farthest reaches of the national memory as rumor and suspicion about the violent acts committed against women during a time of chaos, havoc, and savagery. The literary world quickly recognized the merits of this book: It was highly praised by Hungarian reviewers, awarded prizes, and has already been translated into French, Rumanian, Slovenian, and Serbian.
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cover of Organised Crime and Migration: Criminal Groups, Corruption and the Displacement Crisis in Central America and Mexico

Organised Crime and Migration

Criminal Groups, Corruption and the Displacement Crisis in Central America and Mexico

Victorie Knox

University of London Press, 2026

This book is the first to consider together three major, interconnected ways in which organized crime shapes migration in Mexico and Central America: as a driver of internal displacement and external migration, as a threat to migrants in transit, and as a facilitator of unauthorized migration through people-smuggling.

Organized criminal groups have been involved in the abuse of migrants and people-smuggling in Mexico for many years. A displacement crisis has emerged as people with different potential protection needs flee a complex mix of factors in Central America, from violence and threats from criminal gangs, persecution by state actors, gender violence, and hate crime to the impact of climate change, natural disasters, and entrenched inequality and poverty.

Drawing on original interview material with key informants speaking in their professional capacity and with migrants and refugees during their journey, the book analyzes organized crime’s role in provoking human displacement and the abuse of migrants, reflecting on state responsibility, the role of policy, corruption, and impunity in perpetuating abuse, and the implications for human rights. In doing so, it provides a new understanding of the likely consequences of implementing or externalizing migration policy in regions affected by endemic criminal violence and corruption globally.
 
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