{"id":140,"date":"2025-09-22T15:47:45","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T19:47:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/?p=140"},"modified":"2025-11-07T15:43:22","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T20:43:22","slug":"week-4-reading-response-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/week-4-reading-response-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 4 Reading Response"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was intrigued by the format of <\/span>The Beekeeper of Sinjar<\/span><\/i>, by Dunya Mikhail, which almost reads like an oral history. The book is comprised of Mikhail\u2019s interviews with Abdullah, who rescues Yazidi women who are sold as slaves to Daesh officers. Mikhail gives minimal context. She doesn\u2019t tell us what Daesh is or anything about its history. She also gives scant context about the Yazidis and the vulnerabilities they face as a persecuted group. Instead, the context emerges naturally. Mikhail assumes a certain amount of prior knowledge and lets Abdullah fill in the rest. Through the stories he tells, we learn more about the crimes Daesh commits and the experiences of those held captive.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On the one hand, this format allows the reader to learn through immersion. Abdullah rarely mentions numbers or dives into history, instead focusing on stories of particular women. Through giving voice to these stories, we feel closer to the subjects. Context sections never pull us out of the narrative at hand. Readers are also invited into an intimate reporting process. We bear witness to one-one-one phone calls between Abdullah and Mikhail, learning details about Mikhail along the way.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At some moments, I found myself craving context. The risk of telling many narratives in sequence is that they blend together and lose their weight. Over time, the reader can become desensitized to the acts of extreme violence described. Kingsley takes the opposite approach, weaving context throughout human stories. He even alternates between one man\u2019s story and those of other immigrants. A combination of narrative and background create a comprehensive (though never complete) picture of Europe\u2019s migration crisis.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Kingsley also incorporates his own takes, at times. I appreciated this. He clarifies a key tension: as migration swells, Europe tightens border controls. The continent\u2019s response to scores of migrants has not just been inadequate, but also, negligent.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, Europe\u2019s response is becoming more extreme, and sometimes, explicitly xenophobic. Germany started issuing payments for Syrians to return home after Assad\u2019s regime fell. Meanwhile, the AfD gains ground around the country, helping to entrench anti-immigrant sentiment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ben Taub\u2019s reporting gives us a glimpse into migration of another kind. Taub follows the story of Khaled al-Halabi, who was initially not persecuted by Assad\u2019s regime, but part of it. Taub never spoke with Halabi but managed to reconstruct his story, relying on other sources and his French asylum interview. Halabi went from spy to refugee when conspiracies swarmed of his failure to defend Raqqa, where he was stationed, from rebels. He crosses the border with Turkey and flees to France. Soon, scores of Syrians escaping war are also abroad. Meanwhile, the international community failed to persecute a regime whose violence was obvious and widely condemned.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To emphasize this failure, Taub draws parallels between the world\u2019s negligence of Jews during the Holocaust and its ambivalence toward Assad\u2019s regime. Taub makes this connection for reasons more historical than symbolic: Nazis helped form Syria\u2019s intelligence services. The structure that propped up Assad had structural origins in another regime that has been universally condemned. Taub\u2019s story, in this respect, calls attention to the need for international law to protect countries from systems of persecution.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was intrigued by the format of The Beekeeper of Sinjar, by Dunya Mikhail, which almost reads like an oral history. The book is comprised of Mikhail\u2019s interviews with Abdullah, who rescues Yazidi women who are sold as slaves to Daesh officers. Mikhail gives minimal context. She doesn\u2019t tell us what Daesh is or anything<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4790,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4790"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":141,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions\/141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}