Lauren Carruth – författare

Refugees Without Refuge explores what it means to be a refugee without asylum or protection in the Horn of Africa, from the perspectives of people on the move and the people who help them escape. As anti-immigrant sentiments rise around the world, legal asylum and humanitarian assistance for refugees are disappearing. Only about one percent of people escaping violence and persecution in their home countries are resettled, given citizenship elsewhere, or returned home in peace. Instead, many refugees today escape home by migrating abroad—leaving without passports, visas, or protection from deportation or criminalization. They are refugees without refuge. Through an "ethnofictional" intergenerational migration story told in comic form as well as extensive ethnographic, historical, and policy research, Refugees Without Refuge provides a unique case study of Oromo Ethiopians as they travel eastward—often invisibly on remote trails and at night to avoid detection—through the harsh deserts and mountain ranges of Djibouti and on boats to cross the Red Sea, with dreams of work and a new life in the Middle East. Intertwining evocative artwork, storytelling, and scholarship, Refugees Without Refuge demands we look anew at the courage and creativity of refugees and critically assess the tactics and missions of the international humanitarian organizations and governments who purport to assist and protect them.

Refugees Without Refuge explores what it means to be a refugee without asylum or protection in the Horn of Africa, from the perspectives of people on the move and the people who help them escape. As anti-immigrant sentiments rise around the world, legal asylum and humanitarian assistance for refugees are disappearing. Only about one percent of people escaping violence and persecution in their home countries are resettled, given citizenship elsewhere, or returned home in peace. Instead, many refugees today escape home by migrating abroad—leaving without passports, visas, or protection from deportation or criminalization. They are refugees without refuge. Through an "ethnofictional" intergenerational migration story told in comic form as well as extensive ethnographic, historical, and policy research, Refugees Without Refuge provides a unique case study of Oromo Ethiopians as they travel eastward—often invisibly on remote trails and at night to avoid detection—through the harsh deserts and mountain ranges of Djibouti and on boats to cross the Red Sea, with dreams of work and a new life in the Middle East. Intertwining evocative artwork, storytelling, and scholarship, Refugees Without Refuge demands we look anew at the courage and creativity of refugees and critically assess the tactics and missions of the international humanitarian organizations and governments who purport to assist and protect them.

Lauren Carruth's Love and Liberation tells a new kind of humanitarian story. The protagonists are not volunteers from afar but rather Somali locals caring for each other: nurses, aid workers, policymakers, drivers, community health workers, and bureaucrats. The contributions of locals are often taken for granted, and the competencies, aspirations, and effectiveness of local staffers frequently remain muted or absent from the planning and evaluation of humanitarian interventions structured by outsiders. Relief work is traditionally imagined as politically neutral and impartial, and interventions are planned as temporary, extraordinary, and distant. Carruth provides an alternative vision of what "humanitarian" response means in practice—not driven by International Humanitarian Law, the missions of Western relief organizations, or trends in the aid industry or academia but instead by what Somalis call samafal. Samafal is structured by the cultivation of lasting relationships of care, interdependence, kinship, and ethnic solidarity. Samafal is also explicitly political and potentially emancipatory: humanitarian responses present opportunities for Somalis to begin to redress histories of colonial partitions and to make the most out of their political and economic marginalization. By centering Love and Liberation around Somalis' understanding and enactments of samafal, Carruth offers a new perspective on politics and intervention in Africa.