Intra-urban forced displacement: A residential form of mobility induced by controversial constraints

Abstract

Contemporary armed conflicts and wars must be analyzed without ambiguity: for civilians, these confrontations produce massive population movements. In most cases, these migratory flows within national borders. In this context, Colombia assumes a special place. For nearly seven decades, this Andean territory has been crossed by various forms of claims and armed confrontations. Thus, despite the result of the peace process initiated in 2011, nowadays and according to acnuR (2018), the country has over 7.7 million internally displaced persons. Since 1997, the Colombian government has passed a series of political measures to compensate those who represent most of its civilian war victims: the so called desplazados forzados. This article proposes to examine the reconfigurations of the urban forced displacement movements focusing on the construction of this status and on the links between the city and the war. The main objective of the “desplazamiento forzado” law aimed to compensate the socio-economic instability generated by these migratory flows. From there, the analysis will start by defining the “forced displacement” as it is conceived in the Colombian context to discuss the territorial approach applied to this type of politicized forced mobility. Mi PhD work focused on these issues, and more particularly on the situations observed in the 4th and 6th districts of the municipality of Soacha, whose data will be used to illustrate the remarks made in this article.