Jana K. Lipman.  In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and
Repatriates.  Critical Refugee Studies Series. Oakland  University of
California Press, 2020.  Illustrations. 319 pp.  $29.95 (paper), ISBN
978-0-520-34366-5.

Reviewed by Phi-Vân Nguyen (Université de Saint-Boniface)
Published on H-Asia (November, 2020)
Commissioned by Bradley C. Davis

Jana K. Lipman is a history professor specializing in the social
history of US foreign policy. Her most recent book, _In Camps:
Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Repatriates_, is the first
publication of the Critical Refugee Studies series published by the
University of California Press. The book analyzes the politics of
refugee protection during the Southeast Asian refugee crisis between
1975 and 2005. It seeks to answer "questions that remain all too
relevant today: Who is a refugee? Who determines this status? And how
do the experiences of refugees resonate at the highest political
levels and in local communities that are often imagined to be in the
most peripheral places?" (p. 4).

While much attention has been given to the context of departure and
the policies of countries of destination, this book claims that one
must not overlook what happens between these two points, in countries
of temporary asylum and processing centers. The book challenges the
idea that camps are irrelevant to the politics of refugee protection
and that refugees are apolitical and passive victims. In fact, a
close analysis of camps, their organization, and forms of protests in
camps, as well as the relationships between the host country and the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), or its former
colonial power or current ally, such as the United Kingdom or the
United States, reveals that time, place, and context strongly
influence whether a person qualifies as a refugee. This approach
shows both the contingent and dynamic nature of refugee status
determination, and its underlying politics.

The book uses various UNHCR archives; governmental documents from the
United Kingdom, the United States, Hong Kong, and a few from
Malaysia; and newspaper articles from the Philippines, Malaysia, Hong
Kong, and Guam. _In Camps_ is not an exhaustive study of all camps in
Southeast Asia. It focuses on Guam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and
Hong Kong. Each chapter analyzes a different camp at different times
between 1975 and 2005. The first chapter studies the embarrassment of
the US government and Guam authorities when two thousand refugees
debarked there and demanded to return to Vietnam in 1975. The next
chapter argues that Malaysia's refusal to host refugees in 1978 led
the UNHCR and the United States to find a solution to the refugee
crisis by organizing a conference in July 1979, allowing persons
arriving in special processing centers to qualify as de facto
refugees. The third chapter studies how the opening of a camp in the
Philippines responded to international efforts to establish a
temporary refugee center all the while satisfying the Filipino
government's desire to develop the Bataan economy where the camp was
located. Chapter 4 examines how frustrations expressed in Hong Kong
pushed the United Nations to end the recognition of refugee status to
persons arriving in these camps. Chapter 5 studies the transnational
mobilization of public opinion against the forced repatriation of
rejected asylum seekers back to Vietnam from 1989 to 1997. The last
chapter examines how many refugees resettled in Palawan between 1996
to 2005, thanks to the efforts of local Catholic communities. The
book ends with an epilogue reflecting on the US Department of
Homeland and Security's decision to deport any Vietnamese who had
been convicted of a deportable offense in 2017.

The book's strongest parts focus on what happened in these temporary
places of transition. Previous scholarship on the Southeast Asian
refugee crisis has mostly studied the lived experience of
displacement, such as the escape from Vietnam, life in camps, or the
challenges of integrating into resettlement countries.[1] A few have
analyzed the politics of refugee protection from a legal, regional,
or national perspective.[2] Lipman's book contributes to this second
trend of the literature. First, it shows that politics are definitely
involved in refugee protection. Second, the book demonstrates that a
close study of the politics of refugee protection requires an
analysis looking across local, regional, and international
dimensions. It takes a global look at these camps and uses the
analytical framework of empire studies to understand this refugee
crisis. These new insights, applied to the study of international
relations during the Cold War, have shown that superpowers were not
the only ones influencing their allies' policies. Smaller countries
also played an outsized role because they were the ones who mediated
and enabled the superpower's influence across the globe.[3] _In
Camps_ shows that small countries of temporary asylum are neither
interchangeable nor negligible, and that they are key actors in the
politics of refugee protection. The book's focal point on the
regional level and on activism in camps is therefore a significant
contribution to the understanding of refugee protection.

However, the book suffers from several shortcomings. The biggest
problem lies in the interpretive choice of using case studies to make
larger claims on the Southeast Asian refugee crisis. _In Camps_ warns
the reader that it focuses on the departure by sea and therefore
leaves aside the Orderly Departure Program, which allowed the UNHCR
to screen potential applicants for resettlement overseas from within
Vietnam, and refugees in camps in China, Vietnam, or Thailand.
However, the author does not explain how this choice has significant
implications on the analysis. By focusing on Vietnamese refugees
leaving by boat, _In Camps_ gives the impression that their fate was
not related to those escaping overland. And by ignoring the
humanitarian crisis on mainland Southeast Asia, it also cannot take
into account the impact of the Third Indochina War (briefly mentioned
on page 57) and the ten-year-long Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia
on the global protection of refugees.

Using specific case studies spanning from 1975 to 2005 also raises an
important question: can individual case studies explain what happened
elsewhere in the region? Lipman invites the reader to "move" or
"travel" from one camp to another, without justifying the choice of
each case study (pp. 19-20). Without knowing if each of these camps
are key actors, representative of other camps, or an exception rather
than the rule, the reader cannot appreciate the analytical value of
these case studies. 

Some chapters seem to overstretch the importance of certain events
relevant to that camp only, at the expense of other developments
occurring in the region. Chapter 2 claiming that Malaysia's
reluctance to host refugees led to the creation of an international
system of refugee resettlement in 1979 is a case in point. According
to Lipman, Malaysia's position reflected its determination to defend
its sovereignty and popular anxieties toward ethnic Chinese arriving
by boats, and pushed the UNHCR and the United States to find a
solution for the refugee crisis so that they would not have to carry
the burden alone. But the chapter fails to put what happened in
Malaysia into perspective. The chapter opens with Mohamed Mahathir's
explosive declaration on June 5, 1979, that he will pass a bill
allowing coast guards to shoot newcomers at sight. The hope was that
this would shock public opinion and push both the United States and
the UNHCR to change their policy. In reality, the call to change the
international policy was made a week earlier, on May 31, when the
newly elected British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, urged the
secretary general to convene an international conference.

It is just as hard to accept the claim that "the Malaysian government
forged its own path.... It would allow thousands of Vietnamese to
stay..., but it would do so on its own terms" (p. 54). In fact, most
of its decisions mimicked the policies of other Southeast Asian
countries. For example, chapter 2 says that Malaysia's refusal to let
the _Hai Hong_, a cargo ship loaded with 2,500 people, land on its
coast proved a turning point for Malaysia's policy and the management
of the refugee crisis in the region. But the chapter does not explain
that the Indonesian coast guards had already pushed the same boat
back to international waters, and that Singapore and Australia had
flat out announced that they would not let it disembark its
passengers just days before.[4] Finally, it is disappointing to see
that _In Camps_ only mentions that "Thailand and Hong Kong were
tipping points" in the crisis, while giving the impression that
Malaysia alone inspired a change of policy from the UNHCR and the
United States (p. 79). Things were much more complicated.

These examples all point to the same conclusion. It is difficult, if
not impossible, to focus on one case study to explain the making of
an international solution. It seems even more complicated to do so
when the solution itself had to be solved multilaterally precisely
because it involved refusals and lack of commitment from so many
actors. It was because the refugee crisis was no one's problem that
it had to become everybody's problem. Like so many other
international events, monocausal approaches cannot explain the
refugee crisis and its settlement. Certain historical events are
international in nature and require a global analysis of their
causes, even when zooming into smaller local or national case
studies. The Southeast Asian refugee crisis is one of them.

Any beginner wishing a broad overview of the Southeast Asian refugee
crisis should stick with more general narratives, such as general
accounts of UNHCR history_ _(_The State of the World's Refugees 2000:
Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action_ [2000]) or Courtland Robinson's
previous study (_Terms of Refuge: The Indochinese Exodus and
International Response_ [1998]). But Lipman's book underscores the
politics of refugee protection, the dynamics involved, its contested
nature, the fluid process of refugee protection, and the role of
refugees and intermediary states in this process. For all these
reasons, _In Camps_ is a welcome contribution to the understanding of
the Southeast Asian refugee crisis.

Citation: Phi-Vân Nguyen. Review of Lipman, Jana K., _In Camps:
Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Repatriates_. H-Asia, H-Net
Reviews. November, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55494

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