Why are people Refugees?

Review also includes:

Why are people Terrorists?, ***, Alex Woolf, ‎978-0750243254

Two more members of this growing ‘Why?’ series, chalking up its most depressing offerings yet, these titles are as timeous as they are right for the citizenship bandwagon.

Refugees first defines the species, separating them from economic migrants and internally displaced persons before looking more closely at their history and the varying reasons for their plight. Emerging from the barrage of case studies and personal accounts that the text offers comes a picture of combined resilience, desperation, and – more surprisingly – a yearning for the homeland. To most of us, I suspect, refugee status is an unimaginable experience; this book gives us an inkling of what it’s like and thereby does a little to prepare its readers to extend a wider welcome to forced migrants.

Terrorist or freedom-fighter? It depends on where you’re starting from, but, see it how you will, direct violent action seems to be a growth occupation now. Some politicians believe it to be the successor to military action – but are quite happy to counter it with military methods. Woolf’s tough read retails causes, methods and outcomes of various terrorist initiatives before examining the much vaunted ‘war on terrorism’ in which we’re told we’re now engaged. Little consideration is given to the need for us – the ‘terrorised’ – to try to understand what’s biting the ‘terrorists’ and causing them to behave as they do.

That said, here is a pair of serviceable volumes which will supply students with plenty of info-gobbets and contemporary phraseology. Whether this will make us better examples of ‘citizenship’ is questionable.