Conceptualizing displacement: the importance of coercion

Abstract

The paper conceptualises displacement as a process of coercive disruption to valued ways of living and functioning. It does so by engaging with coercion scholarship from moral philosophy, supported by empirical research about displacement in occupied Iraq. Coercion and force are largely taken for granted in refugee and forced migration studies, and in migration studies. The paper also considers recent scholarship on voluntariness in migration and argues that approaches to coercion are conceptually more satisfying. To build the conceptualisation of displacement, a systematic approach is used which involves identifying a phenomenon’s constitutive components, and their relationship to each other, before integrating them into an explanatory framework. It argues that displacement is a process that begins in place, during which time valued ways of living, conceptualised as important baselines, are disrupted in coercive ways. These coercive disruptions relate to power imbalances created, or leveraged, by coercers and coercive structures. Displacement’s processual nature, consisting of phases and counter phases, including evasion and resistance, is incorporated in the framework. The different forms of coercion, as well as the phases and counter-phases, that constitute displacement, are explained and illustrated from the perspectives of Iraqis who lived through the occupation.