Vijay Prashad on Displaced People

This week on CounterSpin: AP reports hundreds of civilians fleeing Mosul’s Old City, climbing over rubble as explosions rock the streets, as government forces battle the Islamic State. Cameroonian officials deny UN reports they’ve driven out at least 5,000 Nigerian refugees in recent weeks, rounding them up in trucks, often separating parents and children, taking them back to the danger they thought they’d escaped. Suicides are up alarmingly among Myanmar refugees in a camp in Thailand. Meanwhile, Austrian defense officials say they will use armored vehicles and troops to keep refugees from crossing the border from Italy.

Displaced people aren’t one story; they’re 65.9 million, according to the UN Refugee Agency. But it’s not just a story about individuals. What’s the connection between displacement and the so-called war on terror? Climate disruption? Poverty? On displacement, If you aren’t telling the big, interconnected story, you aren’t telling the story.

Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in Connecticut. He’s author of, most recently, The Death of a Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution along with many other books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. His columns appear on AlterNet every Wednesday, the most recent carries the arresting headline, “By 2100, Refugees Would Be the Most Populous Country on Earth.”

We talk about displacement and displaced people with Vijay Prashad on this week’s CounterSpin.


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