Description
Book Synopsis
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 no
Trade Review
A heart-wrenching, sophisticated, yet readable analysis of the experiences of Georgians internally displaced by the 2008 war with Russia.... [Dunn] unpacks with great nuance how forces of capitalist neoliberalism and Georgian and Russian authoritarianism have structured the humanitarian system along various bureaucratic, economic, and political axes that reward humanitarian action no matter how poorly it fits people’s needs.
* Choice *
Theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically engaged, No Path Home makes a timely and ethically rich intervention in to the politics of international humanitarianism. The book pushes anthropological discussions beyond their often-medicalized focus upon the politics of life to foreground crucially relevant humanistic concerns about the politics of living. The book makes for essential reading for those interested in the literature on humanitarianism and post-socialism but also subjectivity and existential anthropology more generally.
* Slavic Review *
Table of ContentsNote on Place Names in the South Caucasus
The Camp and the Camp
2. War
Intertext 1
3. Chaos
4. Nothing
Intertext 2
5. Pressure
6. The Devil and the Authoritarian State
Intertext 3
7. Death
Intertext 4
8. All That Remains
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
