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New Book: Governing Refugees: Justice, Order and Legal Pluralism by Kirsten McConnachie

Kirsten McConnachie, Joyce Pearce Junior Research Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre and Lady Margaret Hall, has published a new book, Governing Refugees: Justice, Order and Legal Pluralism with Routledge.

Refugee camps are imbued in the public imagination with assumptions of anarchy, danger and refugee passivity. The book marshals empirical data and ethnographic detail to challenge such assumptions, arguing that refugee camps should be recognised as spaces where social capital can not only survive, but thrive.

The book examines themes of community governance, order maintenance and legal pluralism in the context of refugee camps on the Thailand-Burma border. The nature of a refugee situation is such that multiple actors take a role in camp management, creating a complex governance environment which has a significant impact on the lives of refugees. This situation also speaks to deeply important questions of legal and political scholarship, including the production of order beyond the state, justice as a contested site, and the influence of transnational human rights discourses on local justice practice.

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