The Handbook of Displacement

Peter Adey, Janet C. Bowstead, Katherine Brickell, Vandana Desai, Mike Dolton, Alasdair Pinkerton, Ayesha Siddiqi, Peter Adey, Janet C. Bowstead, Katherine Brickell, Vandana Desai, Mike Dolton, Alasdair Pinkerton, Ayesha Siddiqi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030471774
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030471781
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This Handbook provides the knowledge and tools needed to understand how displacement is lived, governed, and mediated as an unfolding and grounded process bound up in spatial inequities of power and injustice. The handbook ensures, first, that internal displacements and their everyday (re)occurrences are not overlooked; second, it questions 'who counts' by including 'displaced' people who are less obviously identifiable and a clearly circumscribed or categorised group; third, it stresses that while displacement suggests mobility, there are also periods and spaces of enforced stillness that are not adequately reflected in the displacement literature; and fourth, it re-evokes and explores the 'place' in displacement by critically interrogating peoples' 'right to place' and the significance of placemaking, unmaking, and remaking in the contemporary world. 

The 50-plus chapters are organised across seven themes designed to further develope interdisciplinary study ofthe technologies, journeys, traces, governance, more-than-human, representation, and resisting of displacement. Each of these thematic sections begin with an intervention which spotlights actions to creatively and strategically intervene in displacement. The interventions explore myriad meanings and manifestations of displacement and its contestation from the perspective of displaced people, artists, writers, activists, scholar-activists, and scholars involved in practice-oriented research. 

The Handbook will be an essential companion for academics, students, and practitioners committed to forging solidarity, care, and home in an era of displacement.

© The Author(s) 2020

P. Adey et al. (eds.)The Handbook of Displacementhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47178-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction to Displacement Studies: Knowledges, Concepts, Practices

Peter Adey¹ , Janet C. Bowstead¹ , Katherine Brickell¹ , Vandana Desai¹ , Mike Dolton¹ , Alasdair Pinkerton¹ and Ayesha Siddiqi²

(1)

Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

(2)

Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Peter Adey (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Janet C. Bowstead

Email: [email protected]

Katherine Brickell

Email: [email protected]

Vandana Desai

Email: [email protected]

Mike Dolton

Email: [email protected]

Alasdair Pinkerton

Email: [email protected]

Ayesha Siddiqi

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

Eight or nine pairs of shoes are lined up in a row outside a faded grey tent on the bare concrete floor of a disused warehouse in Idomeni, a small village in Greece, near the border with Macedonia. The shoes belong to a family of ten, their youngest twin toddlers. The picture on the front cover of this handbook, by documentary photographer Mary Turner, was taken before the informal camp—which is located on and around the train tracks—was later cleared by Greek riot police following the closure of the Macedonian border in 2015. The same thing happened again in 2016 leading to a second eviction. The migrants were seeking to enter central Europe through the so-called Balkan route, some after being bused by private companies from Athens after arriving in Greece from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but also Iran, and North and Central Africa. Many had blocked the railway line in protest of the closure by using rocks, tents, and their bodies. Police encouraged the refugees to board buses that would take them to permanent camps away from the border in Greece.

We were drawn to this image, and indeed many other images of shoes, in the course of putting together this handbook and inspired by our own research encounters with displacement. For co-editor Alasdair Pinkerton, Mary Turner’s photographs resonated closely with his own experience of the Croatian-Slovenian border in 2015 where, only a few hours after the closure of the Slovenian border, thousands of displaced migrants became trapped in a politico-legal “no-man’s land” alongside the formal international frontier (see Leshem and Pinkerton 2016). As the neighbouring sovereign states refused and/or withdrew the mobility of and care for the bodies of the displaced, so alternative economies of care materialised. NGOs and humanitarian organisations rapidly filled the void left by the Slovenian and Croatian governments, supplying food, water, tents, clothes, and, crucially, shoes. Far from being just a random jumble of footwear, the discarded and donated shoes (Fig. 1.1) can be understood as elements within a much larger and more complex network of geopolitical, legal, judicial, and humanitarian forces, pushing and pulling whole communities into forced movements and equally forced periods of immobility. In opening up these spatial and temporal dimensions through these photographs, the shoes reveal that displacement is never a singular event. It is a grounded process bound up in inequities of power and injustice.

Fig. 1.1

Shoes: Discarded and Donated. Croatia-Slovenia border crossing, September 2015. (Source: Into No Man’s Land/Elliot Graves, courtesy of Alasdair Pinkerton)

As co-editor Ayesha Siddiqi’s intervention also demonstrates later in the volume, in a photograph of just visible shoes buried beneath a mudslide, shoes are powerful objects which haunt. They are reminders of not only the intense violences and traumas of displacement but the intensities and intimacies of displacement amidst apparent global processes. Even without the person who once wore them, or who might wear them still, shoes communicate how displacement is an utterly intimate act. Shoes invite us in, to some degree, to the personal and embodied lives of those forced to move, sometimes across vast distances (Arizpe 2019). Shoes walk us backwards and forwards. As much as those outside the tent on the front cover of the handbook may serve as indicators of the stoppages, pauses, immobilisations, and wearings out that displacement inevitably involves, their shoes also point forward at possibilities, about displacements and/or rebuildings in the making.

As of 2018 there were approximately 70.8 million displaced persons in the world, with an average rate of 37,000 people being newly displaced every day (UNHCR 2018). That is 37,000 pairs of shoes, and lives, displaced every day. This record high will only be further exacerbated by the threats of political instability, climate change, and a range of other factors which will further complicate a world which is losing sight of human rights and global governance mechanisms. And yet, the kinds of figures that demonstrate the vast scale of human displacement, if taken on their own, tend to render displacement into a kind of fact of global-scale flows. These are well wielded, quite rightly, by some critical academics, NGOs, human rights activists, development agencies, and global institutions as signals of global inequality, as outcomes of conflict or climatic instability, as symptoms of states acting inadequately, incompetently, or even with zealous intent. Such statistics are also politically mobilised to persuade populations of the permeability of borders that are under threat by displacement. The European border agency Frontex has consistently mobilised its map of ‘invasion arrows’ (van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2019), for example, and they have also been harnessed and manipulated in such a way by others. This has served a geographical imagination of mobile risks, which often transform displaced peoples from conflict, economic uncertainty, and climatic instability into an invading vector from an external and volatile outside. And to such an extent, that even those deserving of care are perceived as clear and present threats to ways of life.

In lots of ways, these debates sit right at the core of why displacement is such a crucial subject for study and discussion. But to equate displacement with popular portrayals of migrants and refugees is far too narrow and loses sight of a broader picture of displacement. They say little to how displacement, as the shoe shows, is walked, is lived, and felt. If the shoe challenges the kind of global projections and senses of scale at play in the above, it helps point to a much more complex picture wherein the refugees at the Greek-Macedonian border find themselves in a stop-start interrupted chain of mobility and immobility which they cannot control. Displacement, for many, might mean actually long periods of temporary immobility and precarity in a camp, or in a long-term period of circulatory displacement within a state’s migration governance system (Tazzioli and Garelli 2018). More still, it reinforces a sense that displacement is something that is, for some, only ‘out there.’ It is for others to do, to wear, to endure. Perhaps shoes, as those most ordinary of objects, remind us that displacement is far more universal than this.

Outside of the lens of the nation-state or the global imaginaries of planetary flows of people and labour, there is a multiplicity of forms of displacement. Just as there have been a variety of different approaches, traditions, subdisciplines, and disciplinary approaches to those different kinds of displacement, from housing eviction to displacement from gender-based violence, from displacement in and from emergencies and disasters to international migration, The Handbook of Displacement offers understandings of the fragility of an unstable world and these multiple threats to human security and well-being. As such, the collection aims to offer dynamic and original analyses of displacement and how it affects individuals, states, and systems during times of war, atrocity, and peace.

The Handbook of Displacement traces knowledges, concepts, and practices in the interdisciplinary study of displacement, and as such provides a crucial redefinition of what, who, and where counts as displaced. The handbook aims, therefore, to not only expand the conceptualisation of the framework of displacement but also provide a foundational text for facilitating future discussion and research that will follow. In this sense, the handbook is necessarily broad and interdisciplinary, drawing from a variety of traditions and perspectives, from urban studies to the study of internal displacement, from migration studies to security. Numerous conceptual lineages and energies therefore run through this book, from postcolonial to feminist theory, from notions of gentrification to human rights. In the aggregation of different cuts and approaches to displacement, we see the volume not as an attempt to build a kind of global theory of displacement. We recognise the potential dangers of doing so as other handbooks and collections naturally grapple with some sense of conceptual dilution. The Handbook of Gentrification (Lees and Phillips 2018), for example, which includes a lot of different kinds of displacement throughout, worries about superficiality. Its editors are equally concerned by being crushed by the weight of theoretical baggage if easy equivalences are too readily drawn between one form of displacement and another. We take inspiration from the editors’ approach as one of ‘mid-range theory,’ in the sense that we may work with displacement, like gentrification, as an umbrella concept, able to ‘consolidate and articulate empirical regularities that would otherwise appear disarticulated’ (Lees and Phillips 2018, pp. 6–7). Our approach is to afford by juxtaposition the dissonances and consonances to emerge between the chapters, within the sections and between them. We are, however, driven in our selection of contributions and topics, as well as the organisation of the book, by a number of cardinal reference points that orientate our approach.

To anticipate this a little further, the handbook is positioned in several ways as a product of a team of editors from a geography department with diverse interests spanning Global North and Global South. Our own research has also contributed to debates within fields beyond or that intersect human geography, such as international development, disaster and hazards research, urban sustainability, gender and development, the politics of emergency, and security studies, to name but a few. While we do not necessarily see the handbook as a product of our disciplinary inclinations, we do want to suggest four possible articulations of displacement that a spatial or geographical perspective on displacement might afford.

Scale: Displacements Beyond the Nation-State

Firstly, the orthodoxy of existing overview texts on displaceme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction to Displacement Studies: Knowledges, Concepts, Practices
• Part I. Section One: Conceptualising Displacement
• Part II. Section Two: Technologies of Displacement
• Part III. Section Three: Journeys of Displacement
• Part IV. Section Four: Traces of Displacement
• Part V. Section Five: Governing Displacement
• Part VI. Section Six: More-Than-Human Displacements
• Part VII. Section Seven: Representing Displacement
• Part VIII. Section Eight: Resisting Displacement
• Back Matter