Book Review: Richard Bessel and Claudia B. Haake (eds), Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 468 pp., £75.00 hbk)
| Author | Guy Lancaster |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/03058298110400011215 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Book Reviews 211
destruction of infrastructure, the corruption and incompetence of the successive govern-
ments, and the lack of even basic health and education services since 2003 have led to
the immense suffering of Iraqi society. The plight of Iraqi women, Chapters 2 and 3
demonstrate, is a direct outcome of the misery of the whole of Iraqi society. Chapter 4,
on the other hand, shows that Iraqi women are by no means passive victims of circum-
stance. Rather, women have organised in various ways to rebuild their communities,
cities and country by running charity projects and education enterprises and by lobbying
local politicians and international organisations for the causes of Iraqi women and men.
This meticulous first-hand review of life in post-invasion Iraq is one of the more insight-
ful accounts of the occupation and its outcomes since 2003. The gendered analysis of
Iraqi society and politics makes Chapters 3 and 4 the most significant in the book, which
is essential reading for anyone who wishes to better understand Iraq, its ongoing recon-
struction and its future trajectories. The above-mentioned debate about the problematic
link made between the occupation and the fragmentation of Iraqi society does not dimin-
ish this contribution.
Yaniv Voller
Yaniv Voller is a PhD candidate in the Department of International Relations at the London
School of Economics and Political Science, UK.
Richard Bessel and Claudia B. Haake (eds), Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern
World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 468 pp., £75.00 hbk).
While genocide, so widely viewed as the ‘ultimate evil’, has long since come into its
own as a field of study, forced removal, such as mass deportation, violent expulsion or
enforced migration, has been less studied as a distinct phenomenon. This is due, at least
in part, to the fact that forced removal has been part and parcel of emergent policies of
genocide or ethnic cleansing. Removing Peoples therefore constitutes a solid attempt to
provide case studies exploring the displacement of whole populations, rather than their
outright elimination, drawing together disparate events previously viewed as unrelated.
The result is an engaging and enlightening volume that demands scholars broaden their
vision to include other manifestations of collective violence along the eliminationist
spectrum.
The editors draw their case studies from across the globe and firmly ground this
volume within the 19th- and 20th-century emergence of nationalism and popular fanta-
sies of national purity. In a section focused upon the removal of indigenous peoples,
Tim Alan Garrison provides an account of the extirpation of the Cherokee from the
eastern United States taken from the journal of Daniel Butrick. Co-editor Claudia B.
Haake follows with a comparative study of US and Mexican policies of Indian removal,
concluding that the US ‘desire to maintain an air of benevolence and legality’ allowed
for the maintenance of tribal unity, in contrast to the Mexican desire to exploit Native
labour, which facilitated breaking apart tribes (pp. 104–5). Other contributions in this
section examine the disastrous US governmental initiatives to move Indians into urban
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