A unified approach to displacement and resettlement

The forced migration studies literature is rife with conceptual tension. It is precisely because of the field's many disciplinary and ideological fault-lines that foundational concepts and terminology must be revisited. While specialists acknowledge the centrality of power asymmetries and coercion, there are still fundamental disagreements over basic parameters: whether displacement and resettlement is voluntary or involuntary, when these processes begin and end and whether they are restricted to physical movement or include other non-spatial forms of dislocation. While this debate potentially signals a healthy intellectual state of affairs, lingering disputes over rudimentary concepts are a major obstacle to building theory, refining and habituating norms, and ultimately refining practice (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). Consensus continues to be hindered by narrow agendas demanding standardisation together with epistemic fault-lines dividing the many disciplines that comprise the forced migration field.

This chapter considers the ways distinct policymakers and researchers coalesced around separate categories of internal displacement and resettlement. It finds that the specialisation of knowledge and expertise in each domain reinforced unnecessary barriers between groups of scholars and practitioners. It traces the evolution of academic-practitioner networks engaged on various categories and how they constituted more or less unitary epistemic communities sharing knowledge about cause-effect relationships in specific policy arenas and adopting shared sets of normative and principled beliefs (Haas 1992: 3). These communities include adversarial advocacy coalitions and more collaborative public-policy networks that transmit and promote normative and ontological axioms across policy arenas. While discourse and practice associated with development, conflict and natural disaster-induced internal displacement and resettlement are epistemologically and bureaucratically compartmentalised, a unified perspective reveals that they have more in common than often assumed.

A critical review of core concepts in forced migration studies is essential to establishing a coherent and consistent nomenclature for the remainder of this volume. Despite their shared characteristics, different categories of forced migration are conceptually segmented and seldom compared, either in Sri Lanka or elsewhere. The particular framing of specific categories inevitably leads to specific forms of policy and practice. Many of the basic assumptions underpinning these framings play a crucial role in shaping specific regimes for categories of internal displacement and resettlement. In revealing the basic tensions in fundamental concepts of forced migration, the chapter demonstrates how more nuanced and comparative study could lead to very different judgements and conclusions relating to protection and durable solutions.

Definitions and labels

Definitions and labels matter. The representation of conditions and experiences in certain ways serves specific interests and is an inescapable element of public policymaking, its bureaucracies and its discourse. How, by and for whom a concept or phenomenon is defined and labelled frames debates, the design and implementation of interventions and valuations of success or failure. Labelling is neither neutral nor benign. In the case of the refugee label, Zetter (2007: 188) traces out the ways in which it is 'formed, transformed and "normalised" in policy discourse by bureaucratic practices which seem necessary, appropriate and even benign'. But the highly politicised dynamics of these processes are concealed. Labels affect the balance of power as a result of their capacity to reinforce or deny identity and guarantee conditionality, differentiation, inclusion and exclusion. Labels are therefore an essential feature of stereotyping and social control.

There is a compelling theoretical and moral case for enhanced clarity and interrogation of labels in the forced migration field. Certain refugee studies specialists actively critique the political interests that inform the labelling of refugees and the terminological opacity of their field (Zetter 1991, 2007; Turton 2003). Hathaway (2006: 2) believes that forced migration scholars have 'an ethical responsibility not to adopt categorical distinctions which, while perhaps administratively convenient, fail to reflect true substantive differences'. If arbitrary labels are uncritically accepted and academic contributions reinforce the absorption of these labels into policy 'then we acquiesce in and perhaps even support that arbitrariness' (ibid.).

Labels are iteratively transmitted between theory and practice. In the case of forced migration studies, as in other sectors relating to development or international law, the divide between the academic and practitioner community is blurred. For example, many labels regularly deployed in contemporary academic discourse featured prominently in the development, humanitarian, post-conflict recovery and natural disaster management sectors since at least the mid-twentieth century (Zolberg et al. 1989; Wood 1985; Drabek and Boggs 1968; White, G. F. 1964). Likewise, a sizeable number of the anthropologists and sociologists making seminal contributions to the forced migration field in the 1970s and 1980s were simultaneously employed by organisations involved in 'managing' displacement and resettlement, thus hastening an iterative exchange between theoreticians and practitioners. Since the 1970s, labels were simultaneously refined and cognitively transmitted between academia and various policy arenas through specialist journals, public forums, training courses and universities (Dwivedi 2002).

It is not surprising that the forced migration field exhibits so many contested labels. The literature itself comprises a diverse collection of scholarly and policy writings on subjects ranging from refugee law, economic and labour migration to people-trafficking, transhumance, colonisation and frontier settlement. Given such intrinsic disciplinary heterogeneity, the proliferation of different labels was inevitable. Zetter (1991) describes these competing labels as akin to 'currencies' with fluctuating values and exchange rates. But without a fixed exchange rate, consensus on core concepts and definitions remained elusive. There are also a wide range of bureaucratic interests that condition the application of specific labels. Labels are harnessed by a public policy discourse, whether security-oriented, developmental or humanitarian and used to...