Refugees, Conflict and the Search for Belonging

Lucy Hovil

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783319335629
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319335636
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is about the convergence of two problems: the ongoing realities of conflict and forced migration in Africa's Great Lakes region, and the crisis of citizenship and belonging. By bringing them together, the intention is to see how, combined, they can help point the way towards possible solutions. Based on 1,115 interviews conducted over 6 years in the region, the book points to ways in which refugees challenge the parameters of citizenship and belonging as they carve out spaces for inclusion in the localities in which they live. Yet with a policy environment that often leads to marginalisation, the book highlights the need for policies that pull people into the centre rather than polarise and exclude; and that draw on, rather than negate, the creativity that refugees demonstrate in their quest to forge spaces of belonging.

© The Author(s) 2016

Lucy HovilRefugees, Conflict and the Search for Belonging10.1007/978-3-319-33563-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Lucy Hovil¹

(1)

International Refugee Rights Initiative, Bath, UK

End Abstract

In April 2015, President Nkurunziza of Burundi announced he would run for a third term despite a constitutional provision limiting presidents to two terms. He argued that his first term did not count towards the constitutional limit as he was not popularly elected. His decision sparked fierce opposition, and protests rocked the capital Bujumbura. Although an attempted coup d’état in May 2015 was quelled, the situation rapidly escalated and Burundi, a country with a long history of mass violence that had been negotiating a protracted and painful transition towards peace since the signing of the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement in August 2000, was once more destabilised. By the end of 2015, more than 225,000 refugees had fled to neighbouring states, ¹ reversing a massive repatriation exercise that had been carried out since 2002 in which approximately half a million refugees had returned to Burundi. While the international community seemed to be caught on the back foot by this mass exodus from the country, few Burundians were surprised. They had been reading the signals of a pending crisis for months—in fact, years. Since coming to power, the government had been growing increasingly repressive, deploying a toxic mix of media control, intimidation of civil society and arbitrary arrest of opposition. The announcement of President Nkurunziza’s intention to stand for a third term was simply the final straw.

These events in Burundi, in which the dividends of peace appeared to disintegrate in a matter of days, reflect many of the dynamics that have haunted Africa’s Great Lakes region ² for decades. Conflict and displacement in the region seem to be as entrenched as they are perplexing. With the exception of Tanzania, all the countries in the region have generated refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in large numbers since independence, and all have hosted refugees. In addition to postcolonial violence that erupted in a number of countries, a pivotal moment in the region’s more recent history was the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The genocide and the aftershocks it generated led to conflict and displacement on a massive scale as the interconnectedness of countries in the region became painfully apparent. Its repercussions continue to be felt today throughout the region and beyond. Although stability has been retained or restored in many parts of the region, ongoing conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the outbreak of civil war in South Sudan in December 2013, and the growing crisis in Burundi reveal the region’s continuing vulnerability to conflict. Hundreds of thousands of people in the region have remained displaced, some for decades, with no solutions in sight, while thousands of others have found themselves re-displaced.

Of course, recurrent episodes of conflict and violence are not unique to the Great Lakes region. One only has to look at the First World War, the war that was supposed to end all wars, to see how one major conflict can set the stage for another—in this case, the Second World War. Yet it is self-evident that there is insufficient understanding of and response to violence in the Great Lakes—indeed, in Africa as a whole. While there is, indisputably, a rich, academic literature that focuses on conflict in the region and that places conflict within a broader context of colonialism and postcolonialism, it has failed to sufficiently permeate and infuse both popular and policy-based understandings of conflict and displacement. Instead, there is often a disconnect between realities on the ground and policy responses. As a result, often in situations of conflict on the continent an adjective is prescribed by external commentators that is quickly accepted as gospel—most commonly ethnic or tribal, and sometimes sectarian. Time and again, this misdiagnosis proves to be a dangerous business. Once a label is fixed to a conflict it can become not only a dominant explanation for that conflict, but can also overly influence approaches to resolution. It is not surprising, therefore, that ceasefires, peace agreements and externally enforced power sharing arrangements based on reductive understandings of causes of conflict prove to be quick fixes, little more than holding exercises until conflict breaks out again. At the same time, peace agreements that do incorporate text that addresses drivers of conflict often fail to be implemented.

By way of an example, for decades, a dominant populist narrative around the war in Sudan was of a war between the Muslim north and the Christian/animist south. While some disputed this narrative—and there was also a logic to it that was borne out in reality—this binary representation of conflict failed to allow for a full understanding of the multiple complex factors driving a war that was, in fact, between a centralised state and multiple sites of marginalisation across the country. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that was signed in 2005 was eventually whittled down to only one of its elements—the referendum on the independence of the south—despite its comprehensive provisions on democratisation and political pluralism. The referendum neither resolved conflict in the reduced state of Sudan (as evidenced by renewed conflict in Darfur and, more recently, in South Kordofan and Blue Nile), nor led to consolidated peace in the newly created state of South Sudan (now graduated to the label of ‘ethnic’ conflict). The misdiagnosis of the problem enabled those with short term political agendas to scrap the democratic transformation agenda that had been included in the CPA, and consequently the secession of the South has failed to generate peace in either Sudan or the new South Sudan.

In the same way, the prevalent interpretation of past violence in Rwanda—and, therefore, the response to that violence—has often been reduced to ethnic genocide of Tutsis by Hutus in 1994. There is seldom mention of the broader context of violence (including an ongoing rebel war and attacks on refugees camps in eastern DRC) in which the genocide took place. As a result, inadequate recognition has been given of the need to engage with broader issues of post-conflict (as opposed to exclusively post-genocide) recovery, and has enabled the post-genocide government to avoid scrutiny for its own actions. Once again, therefore, it is unsurprising that individuals continue to flee Rwanda in fear for their lives as a repressive state feeds off its genocide credit, and that the lack of honest appraisal of what took place during and after the genocide continues to haunt the region, not least in the form of cornered militias in eastern DRC trying to fight their way out of an alleged génocidaire cul-de-sac.

A key problem with placing conflict into these moulds is that it positions individuals caught up in them—and, often, displaced from them—into one-dimensional categories. This approach ignores local realities in which people create and maintain multiple forms of belonging not least in order to ensure multiple forms of legitimacy and access to resources. These strategies of belonging are highlighted by those who are forced into exile either within their own state or outside of it. While not denying that people might identify themselves along ethnic and/or sectarian lines—just as they might identify themselves along gender or economic lines—in a context of multiple forms and expressions of belonging, the reduction of conflict to binaries inevitably falls wide of the mark. These narratives are in direct contrast to a deep and long-developed literature on conflict, citizenship and refugees, and on the exclusionary logics of states and humanitarian governance. ³ Yet somehow, when it comes to generating appropriate policy responses, they often fail to connect.

In response, this book examines the convergence of two problems—the ongoing realities of conflict and forced migration in the Great Lakes region, and the crisis of citizenship and belonging. By bringing them together, the intention is not to create a bigger problem but to see how, by looking at them in one space, one can point the way towards possible solutions. It argues that issues of inclusion and exclusion animate and sustain cycles of violence and displacement in the Great Lakes region and beyond. The likelihood of conflict increases when collective identities are mobilised, politicised and ‘hardened’ by conflict entrepreneurs, thus reducing the scope for overlapping and multiple identities that would otherwise facilitate inter-group relations. By the same logic, expanding spaces for belonging becomes an important part of creating the conditions for sustainable peace. These spaces are ones in which multiple identities can exist; in which identities are seen as fluid, ever changing; and in which systems for marking out ‘difference’ are carefully crafted so as to not create hardened boundaries of insiders and outsiders. It argues that citizenship and belonging are both the cause and part of a possible resolution to ongoing conflict and displacement in the region.

The lived reality of exile—incorporating both the response of and response to refugees—provides a litmus test for understanding these dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Causes of exile—for instance, groups being discriminated against for their association with a particular identity; the ongoing failures to create new spaces for belonging in exile in which refugees continue to be marginalised from the polity; and the many problems associated with enacting ‘durable solutions’ to displacement – are all evidence of this. Therefore, this book explores the multiple factors, dynamics or relationships that revolve around an individual refugee—or group of refugees—and the ways in which these factors enhance or compromise their ability to belong. In turn, it points towards broader issues of conflict and demonstrates why, until key issues around belonging are resolved and are reflected in equitable governance structures, the region will remain prone to the resurgence of episodes of violence, conflict and consequent displacement.

1.1 Overview of the Field Research and Methodology

This book is based on six years of field research in the Great Lakes region, which formed part of a research project initiated and managed by the International Refugee Rights Initiative in conjunction with the Social Science Research Council, and for which the author was the lead researcher. ⁴ The project produced nine working papers, each focusing on one unit of field research. This book seeks to place the research in a broader frame and to draw out key findings and lessons learned from across the case studies. Each one focused, in some way, on the linkages between citizenship and forced displacement in the Great Lakes region, and specifically examined the differences and, more importantly, the interaction between local and national understandings of belonging. It intersects with a long and well-developed conversation among scholars and policymakers about the ongoing shortcomings within the refugee policy and humanitarian regime, produced not just by the regime itself but also by the legal, political and social contexts within countries that host refugees and displaced people or who are accepting home returnees. In essence, it argues that the logic of exclusion that is at work in formal, legal mechanisms of citizenship in postcolonial states in the Great Lakes colludes with the logic of the refugee regime (as manifest in the mechanics of humanitarianism), that helps maintain exclusion as the default position for those who have been exiled from their state (and which affects the ability of those displaced internally to integrate and the prospects for return of both groups). However, it also argues that the problem is far broader, and lies in the fact that the dilemmas around access to meaningful citizenship that so adversely affect refugees in the Great Lakes region are actually born of the very logic of modern states themselves, not just postcolonial African ones.As Agier has argued, many of the problems relating to the humanitarian apparatus or refugee regime stem from its embeddedness in the nation-state model and, indeed, the extent to which it seeks to reproduce tightly defined nation-statist forms of governance in managing refugee subjects. ⁵

A total of nine studies were conducted between 2008 and 2012 with refugees, internally displaced groups and returnees in seven countries of the Great Lakes region. The book also draws on subsequent visits by the author to the region, including to South Sudan in October 2015 and May 2016, and Burundi in February 2016. The main intention throughout the research was to consider the linkages between conflict and displacement on the one hand, and the dynamics of exclusion and access to citizenship on the other. Under this broad framework, specific facets were explored in each of the case studies in order to gain insight into different aspects of the lived experience of exile and possible resolution to that exile. Thus, the main question throughout the research was how issues around access to citizenship and processes of exclusion affect the experience of displacement, and the various forms of belonging that are deployed by those who are displaced in order to best find safety (freedom from fear and freedom from want) in exile. The scope was simultaneously broad and specific. The book does not offer full historical analyses of the many complex contextual issues that would allow each case study to become a book in its own right; there is already a rich literature that has done this. However, it does use intensely context-specific studies to illuminate the argument.

In its analysis, the book draws together two connected, but slightly different, approaches to understanding the dynamics of conflict, displacement and belonging in the Great Lakes region. In effect, the purpose is to utilise two lenses which, when combined, show where a situation is brought into focus, and where it is distorted. The first lens, a primarily legal and policy one, engages with many of the categories and assumptions that lie behind the primarily state-centric and legal framework in which refugees ⁶ are supposed to exist. The second, a more socio-anthropological lens, seeks to deprioritise, or even discard, these categorisations and instead look at forms of belonging and exclusion that exist despite, or in addition to, these structures.

The book, therefore, exists in the somewhat murky waters between the demands of refugee legal protection and the rigours of social science research. It tries to hold in tension the fact that spaces for refugee protection are continually shrinking and the label, refugee, is a crucial tool for targeting and maintaining a focus on a specific legal category of people who are living with the realities of a specific set of circumstances. Yet at the same time, realities on the ground demonstrate that refugees have multiple identities, deploy multiple coping strategies, and often defy tidy categories that inevitably fall wide of the mark. This tension is reflected in broader debates between those who emphasise the need to maintain a distinctive category ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Conflict and Displacement, Citizenship and Belonging: A Framework for Discussion
• 3. Living Through Exile: (Not) Belonging to a State
• 4. Living Through Exile: Belonging to the Local
• 5. Local and National Belonging in Exile: Convergence or Divergence?
• 6. Marginalised in Sudan, Exiled from Sudan: Citizenship on the Margins
• 7. Refugee Policy Structures: Promoting or Undermining Belonging?
• 8. Conclusion
• Backmatter