Robert Ferrell Book Prize Honorable Mention 2021, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History Honorable Mention 2022, Association for Asian American Studies

After the US war in Vietnam, close to 800,000 Vietnamese left the country by boat, survived, and sought refuge throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific. This is the story of what happened in the camps. In Camps raises key questions that remain all too relevant today: Who is a refugee? Who determines this status? And how does it change over time?

From Guam to Malaysia and the Philippines to Hong Kong, In Camps is the first major work on Vietnamese refugee policy to pay close attention to host territories and to explore Vietnamese activism in the camps and the diaspora. This book explains how Vietnamese were transformed from de facto refugees to individual asylum seekers to repatriates. Ambitiously covering people on the ground—local governments, teachers, and corrections officers—as well as powerful players such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the US government, Jana Lipman shows that the local politics of first asylum sites often drove international refugee policy. Unsettling most accounts of Southeast Asian migration to the US, In Camps instead emphasizes the contingencies inherent in refugee policy and experiences.

About the Author

Jana K. Lipman is Associate Professor of History at Tulane University. She is author of Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution and the cotranslator of Ship of Fate: Memoir of a Vietnamese Repatriate.

Introduction
1 • "Give Us a Ship": The Vietnamese Repatriate Movement on Guam, 1975
2 • To "Shoot" or to "Shoo": Vietnamese in Malaysia, 1975–1979
3 • A Model Camp
4 • Hong Kong: Deterrence, Detention, and Repatriation, 1980–1989
5 • "Protest against Forced Repatriation!": Humanitarianism and Human Rights in Hong Kong, 1989–1997
6 • Palawan and Diasporic Imaginaries, 1996–2005
Epilogue

Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

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Read: Why Hong Kong’s untold history of protecting refugee rights matters now in its struggle with China

Reviews

"A major contribution to refugee history. In Camps offers a clearly written and carefully contextualized account of the encounters and interactions between the various elements in the international refugee regime: government authorities, intergovernmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, and refugees themselves. This book will also be of considerable value to teachers and researchers interested in contemporary human rights issues in relation to the treatment of refugees, as well as to anyone seeking a fresh perspective on the history of Southeast Asia."
— Middle Ground Journal

"Makes an essential contribution to understanding the politics of refugee status determination and protection during the Vietnamese refugee crisis between 1975 and 2005. I recommend it as a well-researched, engaging and informative read."
— Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

"Spanning four host contexts from 1975 to 2005, Jana K. Lipman’s book absorbingly uncovers how Vietnamese in camps, regional authorities, and diasporic activists shaped the politics of refugee status determination. Lipman charts the uneven transformation of Vietnamese from de facto refugees to asylum seekers and repatriates. . . . A key reference for students and scholars of Southeast Asia, forced displacement, and resettlement."

— Journal of Vietnamese Studies

“Through microhistories that examine the inner politics of camps in Guam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Hong Kong, Lipman captures the vibrant—and at times conflicting—advocacy that occurred regarding the fate of millions of Vietnamese, and the domestic politics that intersected with their refugee claims.”
— Mekong Review

"By foregrounding Vietnamese refugees in Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Guam, Lipman’s careful multisited history, based on a transnational array of archives, will set the standard in English-language scholarship addressing a severe imbalance. This is at once a local, global, and transnational study of the dynamics around the vexed and shifting nature of refugee migrations."—Madeline Hsu, author The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority

"This work belongs in the literature of critical refugee studies currently reinvigorating our conversations as more and more people need asylum from the violence endemic to the deadly intersection between neoliberal globalization and sovereign state power (imperial or otherwise). Following Vietnamese refugees from an older war, what sets this book apart is its insistent immersion in the contingent possibilities of what refugees do ‘in camps’ at the very site of refugee containment."—Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo, author of The Ironies of Freedom: Sex, Culture, and Neoliberal Governance in Vietnam

"In this rigorously researched and crisply written book, Jana K. Lipman grapples with some of the most vexing questions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Camps elucidates how actors in specific local contexts—particularly in the camps and countries of Southeast Asia that held Vietnamese people forced from home following the US-Vietnam War—deployed, interpreted, and challenged global forces of human rights regimes, enduring legacies of colonialism, and war’s afterlife in the shifting geopolitical conditions of the Cold War and its end. It tells a crucial history we must remember in this era marked by the unprecedented numbers of migrants forced to move across ever more securitized borders."—A. Naomi Paik, author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century

Awards

Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History Honorable Mention 2022 2022, Association for Asian American Studies
Robert Ferrell Book Prize Honorable Mention 2021 2021, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

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Reviews

Awards