The Politics of Return

Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan have impeccable humanitarian credentials. Adelman founded the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University, where there is now a lecture series named after him, and Barkan runs a human rights institute at Columbia University in New York. The fact that their book, No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation, is highly critical of other human rights advocates is typical of the contemporary literature on humanitarianism, which resembles the World Wrestling Federation at its height. Just as André the Giant and Hulk Hogan might be friends one week, only to bloody each other in a steel cage match the next, it is now quite normal for human rights defenders to issue brutally honest critiques of organizations with which they otherwise agree and are happy to count as allies.

Adelman and Barkan demonstrate the bare-knuckle...