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What happens when states fail to provide support to populations in need? What are the mechanisms of religious and political engagement with populations affected by organized violence, displacement, and resettlement? The book argues that when state structures fail to respond to violence, religious institutions are often among the first actors to assist and empower forcibly displaced populations. Establishing humanitarian initiatives, fostering transnational conservative networks, and promoting geopolitical interests has defined the interplay between religion, politics, and society in the Eastern Christian world from the end of the Cold War to the present day. This book advances a Religious Failure Index, which highlights the ways in which religious institutions engage with state governance, geopolitics, and international affairs. It offers a rigorous narrative of the ways in which Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Christian communities exert authority in a multi-faith geographical space marked by political rivalry, conflict, inequality, and forced displacement in Armenia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine.

The deep and personal story—told through history, poetry, and images—of the forced displacement of the Sámi people from their homeland in northern Norway and Sweden and its reverberations today
 

More than a hundred years have passed since the Sámi were forcibly displaced from their homes in northern Norway and Sweden, a hundred years since Elin Anna Labba’s ancestors and relations drove their reindeer over the strait to the mainland for the last time. The place where they lived has remained empty ever since. We carry our homes in our hearts, Labba shares, citing the Sámi poet Áillohaš. How do you bear that weight if you were forced to leave? In a remarkable blend of historical reportage, memoir, and lyrical reimagining, Labba travels to the lost homeland of her ancestors to tell of the forced removal of the Sámi in the early twentieth century and to reclaim a place in history, and in today’s world, for these Indigenous people of northern Scandinavia.

 

When Norway became a country independent from Sweden in 1905, the two nations came to an agreement that called for the displacement of the Northern Sámi, who spent summers on the Norwegian coast and winters in Sweden. This “dislocation,” as the authorities called it, gave rise to a new word in Sámi language, bággojohtin, forced displacement. The first of the sirdolaččat, or “the displaced,” left their homes fully believing they would soon return. Through stories, photographs, letters, and joik lyrics, Labba gathers a chorus of Sámi expression that resonates across the years, evoking the nomadic life they were required to abandon and the immense hardship and challenges they endured: children left behind with relatives, reindeer lost when they returned to familiar territory, sorrow and estrangement that linger through generations.

 

Starkly poetic and emotionally heart-wrenching, this dark history is told through the voices of the sirdolaččat, echoing the displacements of other Indigenous people around the world as it depicts the singular experience of the Northern Sámi. For her extraordinary work, Labba was awarded Sweden’s most important national book prize in 2020, the August Prize for Best Nonfiction.