Virtual Library

This remarkable debut book from Philip Gourevitch chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Gourevitch his title.

With keen dramatic intensity, Gourevitch frames the genesis and horror of Rwanda's "genocidal logic" in the anguish of its aftermath: the mass displacements, the temptations of revenge and the quest for justice, the impossibly crowded prisons and refugee camps. Through intimate portraits of Rwandans in all walks of life, he focuses on the psychological and political challenges of survival and on how the new leaders of postcolonial Africa went to war in the Congo when resurgent genocidal forces threatened to overrun central Africa.

Can a country composed largely of perpetrators and victims create a cohesive national society? This moving contribution to the literature of witness tells us much about the struggle everywhere to forge sane, habitable political orders, and about the stubbornness of the human spirit in a world of extremity.

Europe faces the challenge of enormous recent asylum seeker inflows, and the allocation of these immigrants across European countries remains severely skewed, with some countries having a much larger per capita share of asylum applicants than others. Consequently, there is a debate at the EU level on how to allocate asylum seekers in order to tackle this imbalance. The present study focuses on preferences of European citizens towards the supranational policy issue of achieving a more equalized distribution of asylum seekers. Several theoretical arguments point towards asylum seeker intake, general immigrants’ legal status, prior immigration stocks, and economic circumstances as explanatory mechanisms at the macro level. We test these propositions using Eurobarometer data from 2015. The results show that a high level of asylum seeker intake and larger immigrant stocks in 2010 are associated with a greater willingness to redistribute asylum seekers. Apart from this, integration policies also play a role: the more inclusive a country’s political stance towards Third-Country Nationals, the higher the public support for a better allocation of asylum seekers. These results also emerge when excluding the top five asylum seeking destinations. At the individual level, views of the EU as a competent political actor and general immigration attitudes are substantially related to the support for redistribution efforts. These individual-level patterns occur both in countries with many and in countries with few asylum seekers, indicating that respondents largely take a broad European view on this topic, rather than a national one.

In 2014, the arrest and detention of thousands of desperate young migrants at the southwest border of the United States exposed the U.S. government's shadowy juvenile detention system, which had escaped public scrutiny for years. This book tells the story of six Central American and Mexican children who are driven from their homes by violence and deprivation, and who embark alone, risking their lives, on the perilous journey north. They suffer coercive arrests at the U.S. border, then land in detention, only to be caught up in the battle to obtain legal status. Whose Child Am I? looks inside a vast, labyrinthine system by documenting in detail the experiences of these youths, beginning with their arrest by immigration authorities, their subsequent placement in federal detention, followed by their appearance in deportation proceedings and release from custody, and, finally, ending with their struggle to build new lives in the United States. This book shows how the U.S. government got into the business of detaining children and what we can learn from this troubled history.