Abstract
In The Concerned Women of Buduburam, Elizabeth Holzer examines the conflicting social dynamics among three political actors—the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Ghanaian authorities, and a Liberian female refugee activist group identified as “the Concerned Women”—in a long-standing refugee camp, Buduburam, in Ghana. Drawing from fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork centering on protests during 2007 and 2008 led by the refugee group against the UNHCR’s migration program, Holzer reveals the complex mechanisms of humanitarian politics and the building of refugee activism.
The book is well constructed throughout its two large parts. The opening chapter gives readers an overall review of the existing literature on humanitarian organizations and introduces the puzzles that the author attempts to solve. Holzer presents her core questions as “how and with what consequences people engage with ordinary political concerns in extraordinary circumstances” and “why . . . some mundane political activities become viewed as dangerous politics rather than civil society in action” (p. 4). In responding to these inquires, the first part of the book provides readers with a socio-political background of the refugee camp and the relationships among the three actors. Holzer vividly describes the ways in which camp residents face chronic shortages of humanitarian aid, including basic supplies of electricity and water; as a consequence, civic engagement comes to constitute a normal part of camp life. At the same time, the rule of “bifurcated governmentality,” through which the Ghanaian officials and NGO subcontractors administer social service provision for the sake of the UNHCR, blurs the division of responsibilities in the refugees’ eyes regarding humanitarian aid between the UNHCR and the host government. This discourse leads refugees to blame the Ghanaian government for scarce resources while perceiving the UNHCR as a compassionate caregiver.
The second part of the book documents the way in which the protests developed and examines why the UNHCR repressed them. Holzer explains the process by highlighting the large gap between the protesters’ and the UNHCR’s views toward refugee activism. The former perceive the protests as part of their civil rights, seeing their strategies and demands as legitimized especially when recurring grievances do not reach top officials. On the contrary, the latter sees them as a revel and a selfish act ignoring the urgent demands of the most vulnerable residents while seeking unrealistic solutions; therefore, repressing protests using the police force and withdrawing humanitarian aid were inevitable responses. This astonishing presentation of competing “justice” is a significant methodological contribution that this book makes to the literature on refugee crises. By examining events from refugees’ perspectives, it proposes the importance of shifting the focus from how the transnational actors repress the crisis to how the camp residents help constitute transnational government.
Holzer also makes a significant theoretical contribution through her account of conflicting political dynamics. What is ironic in the consequence of the protests in Buduburam is that despite the fact that the UNHCR had encouraged those female refugees to engage in community participation and human rights by providing a series of workshops and transnational mandates, it did not tolerate their objections directly against itself. Holzer identifies this form of rule as compassionate authoritarianism and theorizes that “[i]n refugee camps, a distinctive form of rule emerges, one that is compassionate in that refugees and authorities frame humanitarians as committed to refugee well-being and authoritarian in its lack of meaningful grievance practices. But in the absence of clear and effective grievance procedures, ordinary disagreements about public goods . . . [provoke] authorities to react in an ever more authoritarian manner” (p. 162).
Another theoretical contribution that Holzer makes is related to the literature of race and ethnicity and African studies. The interviews with some of the activists and the UNHCR staff members about the aftermath of the protests reveal that actors’ ethno-nationalities play a significant role in the practice of the transnational government. Despite the fact that the UNHCR was the actual agent endorsing the host government’s use of violent repression, the protesters consistently perceived the UNHCR as a strong supportive entity. This is in contrast to Ghanaian authorities being viewed as a malignant body making life harder for refugees. Holzer theorizes the mechanism that promotes this cognitive framework as imbedding a belief of corrupt and biased local African officials along with an unfounded trust toward neutral “white foreigners,” thus leading refugees to hold this opposing attitude toward these two agents.
Despite the book’s many strengths, I did find some issues and questions that might arise for sociological readers. First, there is little discussion of gender throughout the book. Holzer does not explain how gender matters (or does not matter) in her observation and analysis. Readers might wonder what sociocultural factors mobilize those female refugees to so actively participate in the protests and how their activism intersects theories of feminism and gender studies. For instance, in an early chapter Holzer documents an incident of domestic violence in her compound and the reactions of neighboring residents. While the vignette is effective to highlight the struggle in the daily lives of refugees and the developed sense of community among them, the significance of gender is overlooked in its discussion and analysis. Some accounting for the sociocultural and domestic environment surrounding female refugees would help readers better understand the relationship between their gender identity and the subsequent development of activism.
Along with this issue, readers may wonder how such a new women’s group became so influential in the discourse of the protests. Holzer introduces factionalism in the refugee camp; however, questions of how the “Concerned Women” competed with dominant male and veteran female groups to become the leader of the protests remain unanswered. Lastly, as a minor suggestion I would like to have seen a few more visual images that illustrate refugees’ daily lives and political engagement presented in the book. (Honestly, I was quite surprised with the description of the established township of the refugee camp with a large high school, a bank, and an Internet café, which is largely contrasting with widespread established images of “refugee camps.”) Readers who might not have a working knowledge of this particular refugee camp would appreciate such supplemental channels that allow them to be familiar with the surrounding conditions of the actors and the dynamics of protests described by the author’s ethnographic sketches.
Besides the few suggestions listed above, this book is full of sociopolitical accounts of the multilayered relationships among refugees, the host government, and the transnational agency. Provisions of humanitarian aid for refugees are becoming increasingly critical issues as civil conflict, violence, and terrorism prevail on a larger scale in various regions of the world today. Transnational governing bodies and first-world countries are facing a dilemma between their principles of humanitarianism and authoritative roles as global leaders. In addition to the scholarly contributions discussed above, Holzer’s underlining of the importance of including refugees’ perspectives in the decision-making process itself is a worthwhile contribution to ongoing debates and offers possible guidelines for how transnational organizations should handle refugee crises while effectively providing humanitarian aid in such chaotic environments.