BEYOND THE BINARY

Throughout this book I have criticised what I have taken to be the ‘accepted’ view in Political Theory and practice, that we can make a distinction between two kinds of forced displacement, the political and the humanitarian, which call for different kinds of response. The basic difference is that the first kind of displacement has the potential to be more-or-less permanent and has severe impacts on people’s lives, while the second kind of displacement is merely temporary, and in general has less severe impacts. What is important, though, is not the severity of the impact but the permanent/temporary distinction. It means that the first kind of displacement calls for political responses, which themselves constitute permanent solutions for the displaced. The second kind of displacement calls for temporary responses. Refugee displacements are seen as primarily political and so calling for permanent, or ‘durable’, solutions such as membership of a sanctuary state, while other kinds of displacement, for example through weather-related disasters, are seen as temporary and so regarded as humanitarian and calling for temporary solutions such as the provision of basic shelter, food and health care.

My argument has been that this distinction is unsustainable, and that we need to see all displacements as political, calling for permanent political solutions. First, we have seen that the permanent/temporary binary does not make sense: all kinds of displacement can be extremely protracted; temporary events like hurricanes or volcanic eruptions can cause such long-term displacements, given the complex relationships between these events and their social, economic and political contexts. Second, we have seen that the political approach has a fundamentally humanitarian element at its centre as the displaced are left with basic support during their displacement until a political solution is found, which, given the first point, is a profound mistake; instead, we have to politicise the space-time of displacement. Third, we have seen that any kind of displacement, not just those caused by persecution or political violence, can mean that people experience loss of membership of their political community and so lose a significant dimension of their agency.