Scholarly peer-reviewed article (Ancestral Home)

The condition in Togo in regards to the economy and the government has improved only a little but still needs work. The current president of the country, who entered into office in 2005, has not really done much to better the country since his father passed the presidency to him. The state of the country doesn’t seem to be getting better at all and many times people seek refuge in the neighboring countries such as Ghana or Benin. This article “Refugee Politics: Self-Organized ‘Government’ and Protests in the Agamé Refugee Camp (205-13)” talks about the different forms of representation and participation set up by the Togolese refugees in the Agamé camp in Benin between 2005-2013. It also examines the protests about their statutory rights during this period. In this article, the people who moved to the refugee camp in Benin were unsatisfied because the strategies that were put in place by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other organizations running the camps would set them up, withdraw form them, and then eventually dismantle them therefore leaving the refugees without any real help. The reason why the camp was created in the first place was to be cope with the influx of Togolese refugees into Benin after the election of the current president. It quickly became an issue because the refugees wanted representative structures that would allow them to interact with the UNHCR and the Benin administration but unfortunately it did not work. Eventually in 2013, Benin authorities evacuated the camp in order to end the continued existence of Togolese in a camp where the organization who set it up had left several years before.