Dispossession and forced migration in the Middle East remain even today significant elements of contemporary life in the region. Dawn Chatty's book traces the history of those who, as a reconstructed Middle East emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, found themselves cut off from their homelands, refugees in a new world, with borders created out of the ashes of war and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. As an anthropologist, the author is particularly sensitive to individual experience and how these experiences have impacted on society as a whole from the political, social, and environmental perspectives. Through personal stories and interviews within different communities, she shows how some minorities, such as the Armenian and Circassian communities, have succeeded in integrating and creating new identities, whereas others, such as the Palestinians and the Kurds, have been left homeless within impermanent landscapes.

The modern architecture of international humanitarian assistance has established a template of provisioning for refugees fleeing armed conflict which is based on notions of encampment and vulnerability. The narrowness of that assistance framework coupled with an unsustainable policy of regional containment have created greater poverty and misery for Syrians fleeing the armed conflict in their country. How this has been allowed to happen on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Seawhere extraordinary social linkages and networks have existed for centuries -lies mainly in the disparities between perceptions, aspirations and behaviour among refugees, practitioners and policy makers in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.

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ıDawn ChattyHence, a multi-layered obduracy and resistance is directed at women organized in groups in the Middle East, the parameters of which may vary in time and space. Women in OmanOman has been reluctant to permit either men or women to organize themselves into groups. Those few non-governmental organizations that have received recognition in the past two decades have been mainly sports, cultural, and university-alumni clubs for men, and a few charitable organizations for the handicapped with male and female members. Only one exclusively female organization has been allowed to function, under the careful supervision of government. All other women's eˆorts to form groups have been perceived by the government as being outside the realm of the culturally appropriate, and these groups have been refused permission to organize. What women try to negotiate in groups is often more successfully re˘ected in the separate actions of individual women.Until 1970, the Sultanate of Oman could justi˜ably be described as the "Tibet of Arabia," 5 so complete was its isolation from the rest of the world. Unlike that of many of the states of the Gulf, Oman's population was markedly heterogenous. It included an elite urban merchant class with pronounced cultural orientation and trade links with India and the coast of East Africa. Along the coast, subsistence ˜shing settlements prevailed, and in the valleys and mountains, terraced farming communities were common. A few towns of the interior of the country were the centers of local and regional trade and some religious learning. These communities mirrored Oman's large and successful colonial empire and incorporated Baluchi, Persian, and East African elements into the dominant culture. In the central desert of the country were a number of nomadic pastoral tribes with cultural and social links that were derived from the Arabian Peninsula.Prior to 1970, communications and travel between villages and towns in Oman were tedious, taking days, if not weeks, to reach a destination. For the small wealthy merchant class, educating their young was extremely di¯cult. The three modern schools in the country took only one hundred boys, and these were personally selected by the sultan. Many merchant families consequently resorted to smuggling their young men out of the country to be educated in Bahrain, Bombay, Cairo, Kuwait, or Mombasa. Occasionally, whole families went into exile, raising a generation of Omanis in East African, British, and Indian contexts.After the palace coup that brought Sultan Qabus bin Said to power in 1970, the state moved rapidly to make up for lost time. Whereas the previous ruler had been wary of "modernization" and progress, preferring to carry out only those development schemes he could actually pay for in cash, his son, Qabus, set about commissioning schools, clinics, and hospitals. Roads and other infrastructural developments were begun. Omanis living abroad were encouraged to return to the country, and many highly educated men and women came back from exile to wor...