African Refugees is a comprehensive overview of the context, causes, and consequences of refugee's lives, discussing issues, policies, and solutions for African refugees around the world. It covers overarching topics such as human rights, policy frameworks, refugee protection, and durable solutions, as well as less-studied topics such as refugee youths, refugee camps, LGBTQ refugees, urban refugees, and refugee women. It also takes on rare but emergent topics such as citizenship and the creativity of African refugees.
Toyin Falola and Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso showcase the voices and experiences of individual refugees through the sweep of history to tell the African refugee story from the long ago past through current developments, covering the full range of experience from the causes of flight to living in exile, all while maintaining a persistent focus on the complicated search for solutions.
African Refugees recognizes African agency and contributions in pursuit of solutions for African refugees over time but avoids the pitfalls of the colonial gaze--where refugees are perpetually pathologized and Africa is always the sole cause of its own problems--seeking to complicate these narratives by recognizing African refugee issues within exploitative global, colonial, and neo-colonial systems of power.
About the Author: Toyin Falola is Distinguished Teaching Professor and the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Falola is the author/editor of over a hundred books on African history, politics, and society, including (with Akintunde Akinyemi) Encyclopedia of the Yoruba (Indiana University Press, 2016) and Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria (Indiana University Press, 2009).
Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso is Professor of Political Science at Babcock University, Nigeria, specializing in International Relations and Gender Studies, with almost two decades of field research and publications on African refugee women. Her research has been supported by multiple grants and fellowships including from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, the University for Peace Africa Program, among others. Dr. Yacob-Haliso's most recent books include the three-volume Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies and African Indigenous Knowledges in a Postcolonial World.
