Politics of Innocence: Hutu Identity, Conflict and Camp Life. By Simon Turner.

Abstract

Politics of Innocence examines historical narratives and everyday politics in a camp for Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania. Turner analyses the discrepancy between aid agencies’ assistance model, which casts refugees as innocent victims with no political agency, and refugees’ efforts to maintain their own political subjectivity. It is a detailed ethnographic account of camp life based on primary research conducted in 1997–1998, with a postscript on the subsequent fate of the refugees. Turner begins with an analysis of Burundi’s contested history, and of the differing interpretations of the country’s violent past on which refugees draw to create moral order in the camp. He proceeds to describe camp life, and highlights the contradiction between humanitarian organizations’ regimes of camp control and their emphasis on refugee participation and community development. This paradox leads aid agencies to construct two categories of refugees: apolitical victims who embody community participation, and political troublemakers who undermine it.