The Concerned Women of Buduburam: Refugee Activists and by Elizabeth Holzer

In The involved ladies of Buduburam, Elizabeth Holzer offers an remarkable firsthand account of the increase and fall of social protests in a long-standing refugee camp. The UN excessive Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the host executive of Ghana proven the Buduburam Refugee Camp in 1990 to supply sanctuary for refugees from the Liberian civil conflict (1989–2003). lengthy hailed as a version of effectiveness, Buduburam provided a best-case state of affairs for the way to address a refugee concern. yet what occurs while refugees and humanitarian actors disagree over humanitarian relief? In Buduburam, refugee protesters have been met with Ghanaian insurrection police. Holzer makes use of the conflict to delve into the advanced and infrequently hidden international of humanitarian politics and refugee activism.

Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana and next interviews with members now lower back to Liberia, Holzer exposes a particular kind of rule that accompanies humanitarian intervention: compassionate authoritarianism. Humanitarians try to alleviate the discomfort of refugees, yet refugees have very little entry to criticism strategies, and humanitarian gurus face very little responsibility for political mess ups. via casting humanitarians and refugees as co-creators of a shared sociopolitical international, Holzer throws into sharp aid the contradictory parts of humanitarian quandary and of transnational interventions in terrible international locations extra broadly.