On the Margins of the World: The Refugee Experience Today
Author: Michel Agier
Publisher: Polity Press
Print Length: 152 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / Anthropology, Migration & Refugee Studies
Topic: Activism, Asylum & Asylum Seekers, Refugees & Forced Migration, Asylum & Refugee System, Exile & Exodus, Identity, Lived Experience, Testimonies, Borders, Camps, Desert, City & Urban, Limbo, Legality & Illegality, Civil War, War, Conflict, Deportation, Violence & Mass Violence, Humanitarian Action & Humanitarianism, Victimhood, Human Rights, Freedom to Move and to Stay, Humanity, Community
Fifty million people in the world today are victims of forced relocation caused by wars and violence. Whole new countries are being created, occupied by Afghan refugees, displaced Columbians, deported Rwandans, exiled Congolese, fleeing Iraqis, Chechens, Somalians and Sudanese who have witnessed wars, massacres, aggression and terror.
New populations appear, defined by their shared conditions of fear and victimhood and by their need to survive outside of their homelands. Their lives are marked by the daily trudge of dislocation, refugee camps, humanitarian help and the never-ending wait. These populations are the emblems of a new human condition which takes shape on the very margins of the world.
In this remarkable book Michel Agier sheds light on this process of dislocation and quarantine which is affecting an ever-growing proportion of the world’s population. He describes the experience of these people, speaking of their pain and their plight but also criticising their victimization by the rest of the world.
Agier analyses the ambiguous and often tainted nature of identities shaped in and by conflicts, but also the process taking place in the refugee camp itself, which allows refugees and the deported to create once again a sense of community and of shared humanity.
Table of Contents
Preface to the English Edition
1. Introduction
2. Bruised Populations
3. The Desert, the Camp, the City
4. The Right to Life
5. Conclusion: What Refugees Need is Fame
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Michel Agier is an anthropologist, professor, investigation director at the Institute of Investigation for the Development and member of the African Training center of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris). His main interests are human globalization, exile, and urban marginalities. He is engaged in anthropological research in cities of Africa and Latin America, the dynamics of social change and urban cultural movements, mostly in peripheral zones, while also working on social groups in situations of precariousness and marginalisation. At present, he is studying how peoples reconstruct their identities after being forced into in exodus because of wars and, in particular, when they are regrouped in refugee camps. He is coordinating the research program Babels—The City as a Borderland (2016–18) supported by French Agency for Research (ANR). He published in English At the Margins of the World (Polity, 2008), Managing the Undesirables: Refugees Camps and Humanitarian Government (Polity, 2011), and Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of Cosmopolitan Condition (Polity, 2016).
Source: https://humanityjournal.org/author/michel-agier/ & https://www.cccb.org/en/participants/file/michel-agier/10185
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