No Path Home explores how life is lived within the humanitarian condition. The book unfolds within a constellation of humanitarian camps in post-socialist Georgia, which were rapidly developed for internally displaced persons (IDPs) following the five-day war with Russia in 2008. Life inside the humanitarian condition, the author shows, is animated by a fundamental impasse in worldview between the givers and receivers of aid. The aid agencies and governments that administer these IDP camps, on the one hand, see displacement as a technical problem of sustaining life amidst conflict, and they manage the problem of displacement through the distribution of standardized goods and services. On the other hand, for refugees and IDPs, displacement presents as an existential dilemma centered on the refashioning of meaning following the destruction of homes, social relationships, and routines. Drawing upon the ontology of Alain Badiou, the book's eight chapters move between the technical perspective of aid workers and the existential suffering of aid recipients to understand how a sense of “normalcy” is built, broken, and reassembled within humanitarian aid camps. The chapters are complemented by four brief intertexts, which clarify the book's analytical coordinates and pursue its philosophical commitments in greater depth.
Following the introduction, Chapter 2 contextualizes the five-day war between Georgia and Russia, detailing the complicated history of ethnonationalism within the region from the eighteenth century to the present. Chapter 3 examines the administration of IDP camps, detailing how aid agencies and workers produce a sense of social order through expected bureaucratic-managerial techniques but also through what the author describes as “adhocracy,” or the application of guesswork and rules-of-thumb derived from disparate contexts. While purporting to create social order, the chapter shows how the prevalence of adhocracy within the bureaucratic structures of the camp actively produces chaos and disorder. Chapter 4 shifts to the perspective of aid recipients, who maintained that they received “nothing” from the agencies that produced the camps and were distributing food, medicine, and clothing through them. A sense of nothingness, the author argues, is an active byproduct of humanitarian programs that keep IDPs not just in the camp but also in a state of limbo: cut off from what was lost and uncertain about the future. Chapter 5 shifts from questions of space to that of time. It traces how the short-term, crisis-driven time horizon of humanitarian aid organizations negatively affects the physical health and existential worldview of aid beneficiaries who endure a prolonged displacement. As agencies draw down aid so as to turn their attention to the next crises, Chapter 6 examines the cultural politics of suspicion and distrust that takes hold among IDPs who continue living in camps and must now compete amongst each other for the dwindling resources flowing through them. Chapter 7 tacks between life and death, detailing the effort mobilized by IDPs to forge a new “normal situation” in the camp through the burial of friends and family. The closing chapter then zooms out of Georgia to consider the escalating growth of refuges and IDPs the world over. Instead of building camps, the chapter argues in favor of programs that would allow the displaced to resettle themselves in places of their own choosing.
Theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically engaged, No Path Home makes a timely and ethically rich intervention in to the politics of international humanitarianism. The book pushes anthropological discussions beyond their often-medicalized focus upon the politics of life to foreground crucially relevant humanistic concerns about the politics of living. The book makes for essential reading for those interested in the literature on humanitarianism and post-socialism but also subjectivity and existential anthropology more generally.
