Retika Adhikari

Refugee Crossings is the first book to examine refugee camps in the global South and relocation sites in the global North together to provide an ethnographic account of the entire process of refugee resettlement. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with Bhutanese refugees as they move through the nodes of their resettlement trail—from refugee camps in Nepal to international airports to resettlement cities in Central New York—this project argues that refugees understand their political and humanitarian status as unresolved even after the UN and US refugee programs declare them resolved. By attending to the lived experience of refugee resettlement, this project illuminates that refugees in their post-resettlement life continue to endure future uncertainties and economic precarity just as in the camps. More broadly, Refugee Crossings dismantles the teleological myth of the “success” of refugee resettlement interventions, undoing the assumption of a clean break between the before-and-after and the here-and-there of resettlement.