No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement

by Elizabeth Dunn

For more than 60 million displaced people around the world, humanitarian aid has become a chronic condition. No Path Home describes its symptoms in detail. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value, preserve bodily integrity, and engage in meaningful daily practice have been blown apart. After the Georgian war with Russia in 2008, Dunn spent sixteen months immersed in the everyday lives of the 28,000 people placed in thirty-six resettlement camps by official and nongovernmental organizations acting in concert with the Georgian government. She reached the conclusion that the humanitarian condition poses a survival problem that is not only biological but also existential. In No Path Home, she paints a moving picture of the ways in which humanitarianism leaves displaced people in limbo, neither in a state of emergency nor able to act as normal citizens in the country where they reside.

268 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 15, 2018

About the author

Elizabeth Dunn is an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. At age twenty-six, she was featured as one of the “rising stars” across all of academia by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her work has been featured in top academic journals, including two recent papers in Science, and in hundreds of media outlets worldwide.

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

As expected, the book is well-researched and more or less easy to read--Dunn is a good and accessible writer. I especially liked the first half of the book, as well as the excellent conclusion. I found the middle to be a bit muddied, mostly because the theoretical "intertexts" seemed to have no real justification and didn't really lead to any more practical solutions. The discussion of devils, deaths, and corpses also seemed a bit out of place, or at least not as well argued as the sections that dealt more directly with humanitarian aid.