Recently The National Archives (UK) Blog posted a piece entitled, “Decolonising Archaeology in Iraq?” by Dr. Juliette Desplat. Whereas I am a big fan of archival research, in particular Dr. Desplat’s ongoing work on making the archive more publicly accessible through her blog posts, I was a bit perturbed by the generous use of the word decolonizing. Decolonization must be protected as a political act. The use of the word as a descriptor is naively violent if used to illustrate the manner by which bureaucracies articulate themselves in the post-colony — those are not acts of decolonization, more often than not they are in their first instances replications of previous power structures. Decolonization must continue to be thought of and contextualized as a mode of political action that, alongside dismantling colonial structures of power, provides the space for the oppressed to occupy equitable power relations. It is about reparations, it is about social justice, it is about equity, and it is about claiming power socially, politically, and psychologically.

My main concern with The National Archives (UK) post was that it was purely descriptive about the colonial archaeologists working in Iraq, their words/letters/notes, and their petulant reluctance to abide by the new rules. With the focus on description, there was a lack of criticality; for example, any mention of Iraqi archaeologists or inspectors reproduced the dismissive tone found ripe in the archive. This was perhaps unintentional, but still problematic and unacceptable. Replicating racialized sterotypes of the other is ethically problematic, and if it is uncritically presented, it continues to travel through citation embedded within other concerns, like that of excavation and artifact movement. This packaged sensibility will continue to be reproduced, for example in Paul Barford’s blog in which he re-presents Desplat’s work under the title “The beginning of the end of excavation archive partage in Iraq.” The reproduction of her work, once again without a critical lens, just continues the cycle of archival reproduction without any sense that such replication could have contemporary consequences if treated without a context or analysis.

The National Archives (UK) post started with the citing of the 1924 Antiquities act which provided quite a bit of latitude for foreign archaeologists to take back materials to the metropole and museums (the Act was written up by Gertrude Bell in 1922 while she was Honorary Director of Antiquities for Iraq). Upon Iraq’s independence (1933) however, the rules changed and archaeologists were no longer permitted to take artifacts out of Iraq and Iraqi inspectors were required on teams. These new rules caused quite a bit of frenzy among archaeologists and their home institutions (like the Oriental Institute and the University of Pennsylvania among others, see FO 371/16923), with memorandums of concern being written to the Foreign Office, and even a veiled threat by Sir Leonard Woolley who “thought it was a strong statement from the Iraqi government, and one that could discourage foreign expeditions to return to the country.” (Desplat 2017)

Unsurprisingly, the archival record posted on the blog makes archaeologists sound like bratty, over privileged school boys who are only interested in their research and antiquities over and beyond the sovereignty of a nation of people. The archival memorandums posted on the blog illustrate the ways colonial epistemic muscle expected itself to continue to work in the postcolony. The clarity of expectations is the most interesting part of the archival material. If the Iraqi’s were going to make all these demands on foreign expeditions then they themselves had to prove their own modernity in order to gain the respect of the colonists. “George Rendel, the Head of the Eastern Department at the Foreign Office, emphasized the ‘serious injury which [the law’s] adoption would obviously occasion to the cause of archaeology in general’. He also thought that ‘the attitude adopted by the Iraqis in this matter [would] be regarded by many as a test of whether Iraq is really a modern and progressive State’ (FO 371/16923).” (Desplat 2017)

Why must Iraqi’s pass a test of modernity to claim their own heritage? This doomed-from-the-start set up if often how patronizing colonialisms find their way into epistemic foundations of archaeological teaching. How many times have I heard, Why should we repatriate these artifacts to [insert post-colony here] if they themselves cannot take care of them?

This blog post is not read in a vacuum, as concerns related to museums and museum collections are not relegated only to archaeologists. On my screen, the tab next to The National Archive post is an interview of Nicholas Mirzoeff by Inês Beleza Barreiros on BUALA. Barreiros does a great job in bringing together some key insights as questions leading Mirzoeff  to outline and clarify his visual activist agenda which he brings to three main points, “empty the museum, decolonize the curriculum and open theory.” I will not expound on all of what these three points entail, but I bring this up just to say that his idea around emptying the museum is literally just that – all expropriated cultural materials should be returned to their appropriate owners. For all those of us involved in repatriation issues and the politics around cultural property, we know it is not that simple nor as easy, even though it should be — and it is also not a new hot button issue or the theory fad of the decade. It is one that communities world wide have been fighting for since archaeologists started taking their things.

Curiously however, although national shifts in excavation regulations in the postcolony are common, as was the case in Iraq, when it comes to indigenous rights and repatriation, there is a particular form of violence that emerges even within the postcolony. The nation state is most anxious and precarious when confronted with indigenous sovereignty; this is true in postcolonial settings, such as in India, as well as in settler colonies such as the United States. The State then, whether a postcolonial or a settler colony, responds with such violence toward indigenous interests that it permeates all forms of interaction, from military action to scientific research.

I was reminded of the violence of science in a recent book by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh entitled, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits, in a passage that brought tears to my eyes and profoundly disturbed me, “In his final days, the last Yana Indian begged that his body be respectfully buried. Instead, Ishi’s museum friends dissected him “for science,” shipping his brain to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. It sat on a storage shelf for decades in a jar of formaldehyde.” (2017: 14)

This is what makes decolonization imperative and necessarily political. It is not just about a blog post that should not have used the word decolonising in it’s title. It is about recognizing, acknowledging and witnessing the violence that decolonization is a response to. Decolonization is not historical circumstance, it is and must be understood and protected as a political act.

NOTE: I would like to acknowledge and appreciate Morag Kersel for bringing Desplat’s blog post to my attention. I would also like to restate that I think Dr. Desplat’s archival blogging is fantastic, it just needs to be allowed to be more critical. I hope The National Archive (UK) blog can find in itself some allowance for criticality.

As a volunteer legal advocate working with refugees who were seeking resettlement, I learned to ask detailed questions about persecution. These were the kind of questions you would never ask in polite conversation: Who kidnapped your best friend? Were they wearing uniforms? What did those uniforms look like? Where did they hit you? Did you pay a ransom for her release? How did you identify her body? Questions like these, which refugees are asked over and over as part of the already extreme vetting that they undergo to be granted asylum and resettlement, are personal, intimate, painful. They demand a precise and consistent command of autobiographical detail and the strength to revisit events that one might otherwise want to forget. They try to get to the heart of what happened to a person, what forced them to leave everything behind.

On a more cynical level, these questions try to catch a person in a lie, to identify those who are not “deserving” of refuge. The answers are checked and cross-checked, asked again and again across multiple agencies and organizations. In separate interviews, family members are asked the same questions. Do the answers match up? Do the dates and places make sense? Were you a victim of persecution? Are you who you say you are? While these questions and their answers shape the narrative of an individual resettlement case, there is a way in which they don’t get to the heart of what happened to a person, why someone was forced to flee, cross at least one border to enter another state, and is now seeking resettlement in a third country.

Vetting, extreme or otherwise, is about inclusion and exclusion. But before someone even gets to the arduous, opaque process of being considered for resettlement in the United States, decisions are made at the executive level about who to include in a broader sense. While the Refugee Convention provides protection for any person with a “well-founded fear of persecution” on specific grounds, this has never been the full story of the US refugee program, where a presidential determination each year decides how many refugees will be resettled, and from where. Some die-hard advocates and detractors aside, refugee resettlement has historically had bipartisan support and mostly stays under the radar of public attention, except, it seems, in moments where it becomes a reflection of broader anxieties and struggles over belonging and exclusion.

The argument for extreme vetting is all about uncovering the truth about individual refugees—the presumed danger that can be discovered by interagency database searches, probing questions, and medical tests. The counterarguments that illustrate just how rigorous the vetting is already are both true and necessary, but they keep our rejoinders in the narrow realm set out for us by those who would argue that refugees pose a security threat. These lines of argument keep us from looking at broader relationships of obligation and mutuality that might demand a different response.

As an anthropologist who studies refugee resettlement, I’m drawn to these larger questions. What logics guide resettlement policies and programs, and how do these processes reinforce or maybe subvert the violence of migration regimes more generally? These larger critical questions get obscured in the focused myopia of the refugee adjudication process, and they are completely obliterated in rhetoric about “America First” or “taking care of our own”. But asking these questions is essential to understanding the stakes of the executive order and the violence and uncertainty it unleashed. It also helps us to understand the implications of such an order for displacement in a global sense.

Only about 1% of refugees are ever resettled—a process where people who have already sought asylum are offered residence, and often pathways to citizenship, in a third country. In 2015, of the 21.3 million refugees worldwide, only 107,000 were resettled. 66,500 of those were resettled in the United States. So if the United States halts resettlement, even temporarily, the global landscape of refugee protection is drastically altered.

Unlike asylum, which is a right under international law, resettlement has been portrayed as a humanitarian gift, a benevolent act of charity. And it is true that typically only the most vulnerable of refugees are referred for resettlement: victims of torture, people with serious medical needs, unaccompanied children. Resettlement is, as it is advertised, an extra protection measure for refugees who cannot go home and cannot live safely in the country where they sought asylum. But, for the United States, resettlement is frequently also the policy equivalent of extending a hand to help someone up right after you stuck your foot out and tripped them. The Iraqi who worked with the US Armed Forces as an interpreter and was kidnapped and forced to flee as a result. The Hungarian dissident in 1956 who listened to Radio Free Europe’s promise that “America will not fail you”. The Degar in the jungle of Vietnam still fighting for the US cause, not yet realizing that the Americans had packed up and gone home a long time ago.

For these refugees, resettlement seems less like a humanitarian gift than a duty, a moral obligation and small recompense for having been so treacherously untrustworthy. Critics of the ban have been quick to point out these cases of duty unmet and I am sympathetic to their efforts to garner support for refugees. But, and this is a banal understatement, you did not have to work for the Americans to have your life destroyed in Iraq after 2003, and surely some moral obligation emerges from that too. A third resettlement logic, frequently employed during the Cold War, was one of naked ideological one-upmanship—welcoming exiles from communist countries bolstered the story of the US as a haven for freedom, creativity, science. These logics of obligation—to suffering others, to allies, to the nationstate—have co-existed in the US resettlement program for years, at various points in tension with one another, and always in conversation with questions of security. Trump’s insistent portrayal of refugees as a security threat, despite all evidence to the contrary, represents a particularly virulent populist answer to a longstanding debate about the obligations states have to their citizens and to non-citizens.

These questions of who should be admitted must be asked with at least one eye to the geopolitics that allow some countries to be “resettlement states” with the ability to choose from abroad which refugees they will admit. How do these politics relate to European states financing camps to keep migrants from leaving Libya? To Australia’s outsourcing of refugees to island detention camps for years in the name of “deterrence”? I would argue that understanding the geopolitics of obligation and exclusion demands an attention to how these processes of inclusion and exclusion are experienced by those who are subject to them and the ways in which these politics are confirmed or resisted social interactions. It also demands that we pay attention to the continuities here, as well as the disjunctures.

In some ways, this travel ban is remarkable and new and remarkably outrageous. In other ways, it is part of familiar patterns of abjection—the ways that some states, nations, people are cast out or pushed down in global spatial and temporal hierarchies. Muslim bodies traveling have already been subject to humiliation and rejection. Airports have already been spaces of violent detention and deportation. Refugee policy and practice has already been part of a larger politics of migrant containment.

As part of my ethnographic fieldwork with Iraqi refugees in Cairo, Egypt, I spent time with families as they navigated the arduous, bureaucratic process of seeking resettlement to the United States long before the ban. I saw firsthand the toll it can take to live in uncertainty for months or years, not knowing if you will be allowed to travel and start your life in a new place. Do you buy something you need, knowing you might have to try to sell it if you travel? Do you spend precious savings to enroll your children in school, knowing you might travel before the semester is up? Do you travel back to Iraq to attend your mother’s funeral, knowing that to do so might jeopardize your resettlement case?

Each time resettlement or asylum is applied for, each time it is granted or denied, geopolitical claims are being made and remade. These small moments add up to a larger picture of who we are in the world. And refugee resettlement is so much more than a simple humanitarian endeavor. It is one way that states tell the story of who they are, and their geopolitical place in the world. These stories seek to set the terms of the debate, to naturalize historical, political and economic relationships between so-called resettlement states and the refugees who seek admission, but we don’t have to accept them. Attention to their fuzzy edges, their inconsistencies, and the ways they change over time create openings for action and the possibility of telling different stories.

Nadia El-Shaarawi is assistant professor of global studies at Colby College. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist whose research is on transnational forced migration, humanitarian intervention, and mental health. She is currently writing a book about Iraqi refugees in Egypt.

The Racist Gift of Immigration and Citizenship Bans, Again

Catherine Besteman

How can we understand Donald Trump’s executive order banning the entry of immigrants from Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Iran and Iraq, as well as all refugees? As an act of national security, the ban makes no sense. Rather, I read them as a racist gift to the white Christian alt-right that formed President Trump’s initial core base. The United States has a history of bans and color bars to entry and citizenship, about which we are rightfully embarrassed in hindsight. The Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted citizenship to only white immigrants, a law that remained on the books until 1952. Entry to the US remained open to anyone, however, until the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and then the Johnson Reed Act of 1924, which imposed the first comprehensive control over immigration. The Act placed a cap on the number of people to be admitted, set national origins quotas based on the 1890 census for entry, and barred anyone ineligible for citizenship from entry. By using the 1890 census, the national origins quotas intentionally favored immigrants from northern Europe and restricted Jewish immigrants because of anti-Semitism and fears of Communist influence.

Furthermore, the Supreme Court declared ineligible for citizenship everyone from Japan to Afghanistan, with the exception of the Philippines, then a US territory, thus creating a new racial category of “Asian” to be universally banned. When comprehensive immigration reform in 1965 removed national origins quotas and bans, it was heralded as a rejection of racist barriers to entry and a victory for American values of justice, human rights, and fairness. A dog whistle to those lusting for white Christian hegemony, the bans are an initial step to return America to a time when Muslims were barred from entry and immigration to the US was controlled by and for whites only.

The Politics of Naked Cruelty

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn

Since the end of the Cold War, global politics has been animated by “humanitarian reason”—a curious mix of violence and care used by nation-states to pursue their own geopolitical interests while ostensibly acting altruistically to provide aid.

No more.

Donald Trump’s refugee ban signals a dramatically new basis for global politics: a politics of naked cruelty.

Humanitarian reason carefully cloaked even its most violent acts in the treacle of human rights and emergency aid. The occupation of Afghanistan, the “liberation” of Iraq and the targeted bombing of Libya were all presented as military action taken to care for the impoverished, oppressed, or forcibly displaced.

Trump’s refugee ban makes no such pretense. Instead, it pretends it is indifferent to what happens to the millions of people who will be oppressed by their own governments, killed in conflict zones, or left to linger in the eternal limbo of displacement. “We have to take care of our own first,” is the constant refrain.

The politics of naked cruelty turns the humanitarian stereotype of refugees-as-innocent-victims on its head in order to justify state-sponsored mass violence against them. Already, Republicans in Congress have proposed that the US withdraw from the UN—which would mean cutting funding funds for housing and feeding displaced people. The right to turn away from starving refugees is baked right into that policy.

The only upside to the politics of naked cruelty is that it is naked. We no longer have to work to unmask the complex workings of neoliberal biopolitics. Power is now unmasking itself, which makes it fundamentally easier to oppose. That is why whether or not we care about refugees—and there are plenty of liberals willing to accept the sacrifice of refugees as unavoidable collateral damage as they focus on populations they deem more important—it’s worth continuing to fight the ban. It’s an obvious place to contest the underlying principle of the politics of cruelty: the right not to care.

Refuge, Refugees, and the Fears We Share

Tricia Redeker Hepner

What is daily life like under a regime that abuses its own people, disregards the rule of law, targets vulnerable and minority groups, and fails to hold perpetrators of human rights abuses unaccountable? How do reasonable people exist – and resist – in a society where those in power have created a nightmarish alt-reality and convinced others to go along with it? At what point does fear become action, pushing one to wager life itself against intolerable repression? These are precisely the dynamics I have explained – literally hundreds of times – to US immigration officials adjudicating asylum claims filed by people from Eritrea. While some of the fears that drive people to flee are indeed subjective and contextually specific enough to require translation, many are not. Being detained for one’s religious beliefs, beaten to death in prison, or subjected to torture require no culturally specific explanations to establish their moral repugnance or illegality. Rather, in explaining to US immigration officials the subjective fears of an Eritrean, or an Iraqi, a Kurd, a Syrian, or Afghan, what we are really doing is helping to narrate a story not about them but about us.

For “refuge” is really an elaborate ritual in which we affirm the predictability, integrity, tolerance, fairness, and inherent respect for justice and basic human rights we imagine characterizes America. Asylum in theory, if not practice, reiterates how America differs from the authoritarian, human rights-abusing states from whence refugees come. That is, until the day we wake up to realize that the refugee narratives we have helped tell for others, the subjective fears we translated as though alien, are really our own. Battered by xenophobia for decades, the US refugee system endures all-out assault by the very political dynamics it was once designed to subvert. In “Make America Great Again” we hear an echo of the lamentations of untold millions throughout time and space who have fought, died, and fled from dictatorships and wars that too often America helped create. But who will testify for us?

Sacred Grounds and Stolen Land, or, White Supremacists are Immigrants Too

Carole McGranahan

We Are All Immigrants. Make America Immigrate Again. Immigrants Built This Country. Signs such as these are prevalent in ongoing protests against Trump’s executive order banning individuals from seven countries from the US, including legally-approved refugees as well as legal permanent residents of this country. His action took place in the midst of other nefarious actions seemingly built on a platform of hate, lies, and destruction. Many have called his Muslim immigrant ban un-American, claiming this is not who we as Americans are. Others might disagree. The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 are early precursors to this moment. However, we need to go back further, to the founding of the United States of America and to a different protest sign: #NoBanonStolenLand

Immigrants did build the USA, but they did so through the dispossession and subordination of other people: the millions of sovereign Native American peoples already living here. These were someone else’s lands, someone else’s sacred grounds. Immigrants also “built” the USA through slave labor. We are not all immigrants. Some of us are immigrants. Some of us are refugees, fleeing war and political violence. Some of us are descendants of slaves, sold and forced to “migrate” to this country. And some of us are native. Who are immigrants then? Those of us, including me, whose ancestors chose to come to this country. And: white supremacists. White supremacists are immigrants.

In his first days in office, advised by white supremacist Stephen Bannon, Trump has left Jews out of a statement remembering the Holocaust, has instituted a ban on Muslims coming into this country, ordered the Army Corps to expedite approval of the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Reservation, and embarrassed just about everyone but himself by not knowing who Frederick Douglass was in his “speech” marking Black History Month. He followed this with the suggestion that the governmental Countering Violent Extremism program would no longer have a focus on white supremacist groups who have carried out violence in the USA, but will instead focus solely on Islamic communities.

I regularly testify as an expert witness for asylum applicants from Nepal and Tibet. Some of these are individuals who have escaped unimaginable political violence. They are looking for a safe haven, a place where they will not live in fear, a home for their children. This country is not perfect. Our history—past and present—is one that includes trauma and unjust war. Acknowledging injustice is a key step in working for justice now. One refugee here in the US told me that as his plane was descending into JFK, as he entered the fabled America for the first time, he looked out the window expecting the streets to be made of gold. He laughed as he told me this, at how as a young boy then man, he had taken this to be literal truth. Our streets are not paved with gold. Our myths obscure the often-painful realities of hierarchy and difference and violence in this country. We cannot let white supremacists and those who live in gold towers dishonor these sacred grounds or all of us for whom they are sacred.

Signs, Accusations, Fates

Nomi Stone

The morning after the Trump’s Immigration Ban went into effect, an Iraqi friend of mine, who now lives in America, sent me a picture of two trees that had just fallen in his yard: a prone cactus, spines pointing upward, and a larger trunk, a cracked triangle of earth around it. “It is a sign,” he said: “It is not safe here.” He, like many of the Iraqis I interviewed for recent fieldwork, had worked with American military personnel as a contractor and translator during the 2003 Iraq War, dreaming of a more just post-Saddam Iraq. Yet as Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation grew, many Iraqis I interviewed described how they increasingly faced accusations of being informants to the U.S. military. Returning to Iraq terrified many of my interlocutors. As the news of the Ban sank in, people wondered what might be next. One friend with a Green Card said: “As long as they don’t kick us out. We finally got here.” And another told me anxiously: “I think he [Trump] will eventually send all Iraqis back, even if they have Green Cards. Iraqis can’t feel safe anywhere.” In a moment of despair, a friend who had nearly been killed by a militia for working for the U.S. military told me that Iraqis who blamed him for his wartime choices said: “we deserve this, to be treated this way now that we’re here.” As I formulated my thoughts today, I began rereading Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition, thinking of the image in one story of a miraculous compass, light as a butterfly in the hand of its bearer, that turns blood-red to signal a turn in the story and the fate of the characters.

More Than a #MuslimBan

Marnie Thomson

Trump has issued a 120-day ban on ALL refugees entering the United States. Supporters of this measure stress that it is 1) only a temporary ban, and 2) it will only last until the vetting system has been improved. But does the ban’s impermanence and stated purpose justify this order? No. Here’s why:
The vetting of refugees is already, to use Trump’s word, extreme. It usually takes two or more years to screen refugees. The screening takes place in their country of refuge, before they ever set foot on U.S. soil. The process includes many rounds of interviews with UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) personnel, an interview with the State Department, multiple background checks and finger print screenings, a review of the case by U.S. Immigration Headquarters, an in-person interview with the Department of Homeland Security, medical examinations, U.S. cultural orientation, and finally a multi-agency security check prior to departure. For more details, please see this White House infographic and this U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) testimony.

Refugee vetting works. Zero fatal terror attacks on U.S. soil have been perpetrated by refugees. A risk analysis of immigration terrorism conducted by the Cato Institute found that the chance of a refugee murdering an American in a terrorist attack is 1 in 3.64 billion per year.

Temporary bans have permanent consequences. While Iraqi refugee resettlement slowed in 2011, halting all refugee resettlement is unprecedented. While impossible to know all of the ripple effects, it is certain that the ban will cause further harm to innocent people who have fled violence and languish in the harsh conditions of refugee camps. It will not improve national security. It will increase the burden of refugee hosting on other countries and institutions, and it will cost the U.S. its recognition as a global humanitarian leader.

Republican Senators Rob Portman, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham have already pointed to the irony that while refugees already undergo extreme vetting, this executive order clearly did not. Following its own language and logic then, this order should be banned until sufficient changes have been made to ensure that it is consistent with national interest.

AUTHORS

Catherine Besteman is the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. She is the author and editor of many books, including Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), and most recently, Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (Duke University Press, 2016).

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Geography at Indiana University. She wrote about refugee protection and resettlement problems in the May 13, 2016 issue of Science. Her book Unsettled: Humanitarianism and Displacement in the Republic of Georgia is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

Tricia Redeker Hepner is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors, and Exiles: Political Coflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and co-editor of African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights (Ohio University Press, 2015).

Carole McGranahan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. Her current research is on political refusal and refugee citizenship in the Tibetan diaspora. In May, American Ethnologist will publish her article “The Anthropology of Lying: Trump and the Political Sociality of Moral Outrage.”

Nomi Stone is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Anthropology at Princeton University. Her second collection of poems, Kill Class (based on her fieldwork within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America) is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2018. Her article “Living the Laughscream: Human Technology and Affective Maneuvers in the Iraq War” is coming out in Cultural Anthropology this February.

Marnie Thomson recently defended her PhD thesis “Stories of Darkness: Congolese Refugees, Humanitarian Governance, and a Neglected Conflict” at the University of Colorado. In 2012, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review published her article “Black Boxes of Bureaucracy: Transparency and Opacity in the Resettlement Process of Congolese Refugees.”