After Involuntary Migration: The Political Economy of Refugee Encampments

(Paperback)

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Some 35 million involuntarily displaced people now live in refugee encampments. Many have been encamped for decades in these "de facto" permanent settlements. The encampments are a global phenomenon with over 90 countries hosting camps with over 1000 inhabitants, cutting across geographical regions, levels of development, and political and economic systems. In "After Involuntary Migration" Milica Bookman has produced the first comprehensive analysis of the political economies of these refugee encampments. Bookman's comparative work draws upon studies of over 30 encampments to illustrate the economic interaction between the camps and the neighbouring host communities. It examines the forms of legitimate and illegitimate discrimination that restricts the camps' participation in their host economies and reveals the different approaches to encampments in democratic, market-oriented host countries and hosts with command economies. Full of interdisciplinary political and sociological insight, this wokd should be of interest to social science scholars and policymakers seeking to understand the complex and highly differentiated nature of the encampment phenomenon.

Reviews

[This work] is challenging, thought provoking, and it is certainly refreshing to find an analysis of refugeehood from the perspective of political economy. While political economists have looked at integration issues, actually taking the encampment as the heart of the analysis is something new, and very useful. It has to be hoped that the volume inspires more input from economists to the study of forced migration, and it is certainly a valuable contribution in itself. -- Joanne van Selm, Migration Policy Institute
This sustained and systematic analysis of encampments is a very valuable contribution to the literature on refugee studies. -- Ralph Premdas, University of the West Indies

Author Bio

Milica Z. Bookman is Professor of Economics at St. Joseph's University. She is the author of several books including Ethnic Groups in Motion: Migration and Economic Competition in Multi-Ethnic States (2001), The Demographic Struggle for Power: The Political Economy of Demographic Engineering in the Modern World (1997), and Economic Decline and Nationalism in the Balkans (1994).