Looking to London: Stories of War, Escape and Asylum

Elena Vacchelli of University of Greenwich reviews Looking to London: Stories of War, Escape and Asylum by Cynthia Cockburn. Cynthia Cockburn discusses how London is celebrated as one of the most ethnically diverse capitals in the world and has been a magnet for migration since its founding. In Looking to London, Cynthia Cockburn visits five London Boroughs, studying how each responds as new influxes of refugees join established Kurdish, Somali, Tamil, Sudanese, and Syrian communities under the watchful eyes of the regimes they fled and United Kingdom’s anti-terror police. Cockburn brings her lively and lucid style to a national moment when right-wing, nativist, and racist sentiment is being challenged by a compassionate “refugees welcome” movement. London is an important contribution to the intense debate about security and terrorism, national identity, and human rights.

Read the book review at https://doi.org/10.1177/0197918318818466.