Jana K. Lipman's In Camps is an important intervention into critical refugee studies focusing on asylum seekers in the wake of the Vietnam War and their time in refugee camps in Southeast Asia. As an inaugural contribution to the Critical Refugee Studies Collective book series, it successfully posits the refugee camp as a critical site of political negotiation for human rights and humanitarianism. As such, refugee camps can be understood as more than transitory; their precarious construction and varying degrees of hospitality expose the enduring vestiges of colonialism, war, and displacement.

Working with archival materials across three continents, including oral histories and interviews, this book proves extremely well researched and supported. While Lipman acknowledges that she does not work with Vietnamese-language sources, the narrative that she shapes is predominantly an international story regarding the shifts in refugee policy, rather than refugee experiences themselves. This particular focus puts individual voices in conversation with those of larger power players, including the governments of the host countries and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Delving into the intricacies of the actual camps in Southeast Asia, the book focuses on four host sites: Guam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong.

Lipman begins her study with the voluntary repatriation of refugees from Guam to Vietnam, in which the demand for a ship to return to their home country, rather than resettling in the United States, complicates the expected trajectory for refugees. The story of the Việt Nam Thương Tin ship demonstrates the Vietnamese tenacity to fight for what they want and appeal to the right parties to get they need.

Each subsequent chapter focuses on a different Southeast Asian region, demonstrating extensive research on their contemporary politics at the time. She deliberately chooses camps that reveal the complexities and contradictions within refugee policy. The Philippine Refugee Processing Center, for example, was a product of Catholic humanitarianism and political opportunism, a “model camp” outfitted with the infrastructure and social services of a small city. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, what began as open camps that allowed the Vietnamese to move about became closed centers run by the Correctional Services Department.

Because each host country had its own interpretation of humanitarianism and its own consideration of the local population and economy, the camps were far from created equal. Furthermore, these places also had histories of welcoming other groups of asylum seekers prior to the Vietnamese: Malaysia with the Muslim Cham and Filipinos and Hong Kong with the Chinese in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Emphasis on each host country's own legislation and legitimation of their refugee policies point to the agency of these Southeast Asian regions and their refusal to be mere proxies to the objectives of the UNHCR, the United States, and Great Britain, who, ironically, were highly selective about which refugees they would admit.

The voices and sites that Lipman highlights all work to challenge the image of a “simplistically grateful” refugee, resettled in a Western country. Instead, the narrative arc dwells a little longer on the uncertain fates of those who remain in limbo, who are not deemed refugees or who face repatriation. Lipman also pays attention to the important roles that civil servants and diasporic activists play in advocating for asylum seekers, diversifying the voices in this complicated narrative about seeking refuge, beyond those of refugees and politicians. When it might appear that legislation and politics render the fate of the asylum seekers beyond their control, Lipman counterbalances this dynamic by focusing on ways in which they were able to exert their agency. In response to the 1989 Comprehensive Plan of Action in Hong Kong that put in place strict screenings and repatriations, refugees protested to send a “telegraph to the world” (p. 174), confirming that these camps were important sites of political negotiation. Acts of protest and violence were not just reactionary, they “were ways to demonstrate control over their physical selves” (p. 175), the precarity of their situation mapped onto their bodies. In this sense, Lipman centers refugees as key knowledge producers and political catalysts.

One area that does warrant more clarity is language, which, according to Lipman, can shift and be used by different groups to support various causes, at times even changing the fate of those seeking asylum. Vietnamese in the diaspora were able to use the language of human rights to lobby the UNHCR and the US government to advocate for the resettlement of Vietnamese stranded in camps, writing in letters, for example, that the repatriation of refugees would be a violation of human rights (p. 190). The same term of language is applied to delineate the status granted to asylum seekers. Early designations refer to Hungarians and Cubans as “parolees,” while more contemporary usage refers to the Vietnamese in camps as refugees, even though this status was not automatically granted after 1989. Language is thus addressed rather abstractly, rhetoric grouped with terminology. Parsing these categories theoretically and drawing an explicit relationship between politics and language could better support Lipman's intervention in politicizing the refugee and granting them agency.

For readers who wish to learn more about critical refugee studies, this book is an excellent start. With insight into how different countries of the Southeast Asian region responded to an international crisis from the 1970s to today, this book is also of interest to specialists and students of the area, as well as scholars of international relations, and international law and policy. It is a necessary addition to existing narratives on refugee experiences in camps, divulging instead the politics that surround the construction and maintenance of these sites, as well as the negotiations of the status of the individuals who populate them. Lipman's book unveils the complexities behind a process that led to one of today's major diasporic communities, all the while raising questions that revise our understanding of who and what makes a refugee.