ICAR

The state and the refugee

Below is a summarised verision of the article.

The forced uprooting of people is a global issue, yet too frequently the debate is confined to domestic politics. To address the wider whole of this problem, we need to highlight connections between different types of displacement, their consequences and the frameworks in which they occur.

Historically, states who create national identities have frequently displayed their ability to forcibly and selectively displace people who they require to be excluded from the new nation. In this context forced uprooting has and will become more common place as states react to both threat and power against the backdrop of contemporary global agendas of development and security.

Dr McDowell specifies four kinds of displacement:

• political
  - deliberate government decisions can uproot their own people; there are numerous historical examples, but Robert Mugabe's Operation Murambatsvina is recently and brutally illustrative. Such policies are often dressed in developmentalist language but can be crude attempts to rearrange the social or ethnic composition of populations.
• economic
  - The desire of governments to accelerate economic change displaces people. Rapid and muddled transformations from rural subsistence economy to export-oriented market economy leads to the evacuation of rural areas. Associated infrastructure projects forcibly displace millions; dam and road-building projects alone displace 9-10 million people each year.
• environmental
  - A vivid example if this is the Tsunami in December 2004. In Indonesia and Sri Lanka this environmental displacement becomes political as government make decisions about aid distribution and how to re-locate people.
• conflict-related
  - Population movement is often stringently controlled during civil or external conflict. Three million people were displaced within their borders as a result of terror-enforced displacement, resettlement and return. These conflicts emphasise the inability of global political systems and development policies to manage situations that harbour the potential for conflict.

There are four similarities that connect these varieties of displacement:

• multiple displacement is common
  - Cambodia offers a stark example of this. Families who had been forcibly ruralised by the Pol Pot regime often fled across the Thai border and have subsequently been returned by the UN with meagre repatriation. These families now face further uprooting caused the construction of major highways. This example show how displacement ties together many political and economic processes the displaced are unable to control.
• displacement disproportionately affects the marginalised
  - The poor, those distanced from the centres of power, those in the informal economy, speakers of a minority language. It is the relative powerlessness and vulnerability of these people that makes their displacement possible.
• displacement exacerbates marginalisation
  - The World Bank has slowly started to admit that large projects undertaken in the name of development often had the opposite effect. Involuntary resettlement produces a new, more enforced level of poverty and dependency.
• the response of government and the international community is largely ineffective
  - The extensive international framework that covers those who cross borders and become politically and legally defined as refugees does not impact on internally displaced people (IDPs). The nation-state system necessitates sovereignty as a major concern, which leaves IDPs as left to (often vulnerable to) state control. There are signs of progress, as emergency response has improved since Rwanda. Money is channelled more quickly and NGOs work by minimum standards for provision of necessities. But this response is often to little and too late, as East Timor and Darfur painfully illustrate.

Domestic law in most developing world countries does not provide protection of rights for IDPs. The balance of power in the developing 'global south', therefore, distinctly favours the state over the individual. Without international penalties, governments are free to displace people for political gain. The scramble for modernisation and global export markets in conjunction with the chaos of small and internal conflict makes the continuation of state created enforcement not accidental but intrinsic.

Last Updated: 25/02/09

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