Julia Elyachar. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo . Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. 279 pages, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth US$79.95 ISBN 0-822383571-9; Paper US$22.95 ISBN 0-8223-3583-2

Abstract

large-scale refugee return. Decades of war and an inconclusive peace process have left the refugees and their descendants, who now number nearly five million, in their countries of exile. The politics of Arab-Israeli peacemaking usually has become stuck on macro-level matters related to the contentious question of Palestinian refugees and their right of return. Yet the onset of the Oslo peace process in the early 1990s led to the emergence of a number of studies, conferences, track two and even track three diplomatic efforts that studied very specific, tangible aspects of just how a solution to the refugee problem might look, including the modalities of compensation and full or partial repatriation. Editor Michael Dumper (Exeter University) has been an important participant in these exercises, and the book under review stands out as an important contribution to the literature that has tackled the specifics of Palestinian refugee repatriation. Palestinian Refugee Repatriation: Global Perspectives, and the June 2004 conference at Exeter University from which it stems, is a valuable collection of articles whose purpose is to explore the extent to which the considerable amount of global expertise in refugee return and repatriation over in recent years is applicable and transferable to the Palestinian case. The book therefore is a conscious attempt to challenge the problem of "Palestinian particularism," the insistence by partisans from various sides that the Palestinian refugee problem is a unique case that somehow must be solved without reference to the large body of international best practice techniques that have emerged to deal with the logistics of refugee repatriation around the world. While recognizing unique aspects to the Palestinian situation, the book's articles nonetheless offer up "areas of convergence with other refugee situations" (p. 10) around the world. Michael R. Fischbach Randolph<-Macon College