511. States of Refuge: Keywords for Critical Refugee Studies
- Author:
- Peter Nyers
- Publication Date:
- 09-2019
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
- Abstract:
- The phenomenon of displacement is increasingly evident across a wide range of human activity, but there have been few attempts to consider the connections between these movements. For several years the international community has been focused on the displacement of Syrians from their homes and the resulting flow of refugees into neighbouring countries and Europe. More recently, more than 600,000 Rohingya refugees have fled the violence in Myanmar and captured the world’s attention. Less well known, but no less significant, has been the more than one million refugees fleeing the violence in South Sudan. All this public and governmental interest in migrants is not surprising given that, in 2015, the United Nations estimated that there were 244 million migrants in the world, including about 65.3 million forcibly displaced people, of which 20 million are refugees. These numbers – and the stories of suffering and survival that accompany them – have led former United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon (2016), to declare that there exists a global “crisis of solidarity.” However, forced migration is just one case in the movement of peoples between states. An even larger migration occurs within states as rural residents pour into cities around the world, vividly captured in Mike Davis’s (2007) phrase “Planet of Slums.” Within many cities gentrification displaces local communities in favour of new residents with greater purchasing power. These events, moreover, take place in the background of earlier colonial displacements of Indigenous peoples and the legacies of those violent episodes. Displacement occurs both in the physical sense of people being moved from one place to another and in a cultural sense as in the case of the Canadian residential schools system destruction of First Nations culture. Shifting focus to human interaction with the natural world, the planet is on the verge of a historic displacement with the extinction of ecological systems and thousands of species with climate change and further industrialization (Jones 2016).
- Topic:
- Migration, Refugee Crisis, Displacement, and Humanitarian Crisis
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus