BEING REALISTIC

Normative Political Theory makes ethical recommendations for policies and practices, and so needs to have a realistic grasp of what happens to forcibly displaced people, and what impact it has on their lives and humanity. The next three chapters aim to provide this grounding for the theoretical and ethical framework I set out towards the end of this book. They draw on a range of disciplines, including Anthropology, Sociology and Urban Studies for example, in order to reach a richer perspective of forced displacement. The approach is one that could be described as a form of realism, as part of the Radical Realistic method I described in the Introduction. This is a realism about the actual processes being studied, rather than the realism that tends to get foregrounded in much normative Political Theory, which focuses on what we can realistically expect nation states to do about forced displacement, a realism which argues that because states will not do this or that we should not theorise about a world in which they would do it. The realism I am using has a clear understanding of what states are doing, and asks what should be done in response. Of course, we might ask who should be doing the responding here, but this is a question I will address in Chapter 12, when I discuss the idea and practice of solidarity.

In important ways this chapter is a companion to Chapter 2. That chapter examined the violent measures taken by global North states to repel displaced people and other migrants from their territories. This chapter examines the other end of that process, the containment of displaced people in their region of origin, in camps and elsewhere. While forcibly displaced people are often conceived of as people on the move, the fact is that one of the major experiences of forced displacement is immobility, of being stranded, unable to move out of the space of displacement. Again, this is because of measures taken by global North states to ensure that displaced people are ‘warehoused’ where they find themselves, rather than able to make an onward journey to a sanctuary state.