This paper examines land grabbing in Bangladesh and views such seizures through the lens of displacement and land encroachment. Two different but potentially interacting displacement processes are examined. The first, the char riverine and coastal sediment regions that are in a constant state of formation and erosion, are contested sites ripe for power plays that uproot small producers on their rich alluvial soils. The second examines new patterns of land capture by elites who engage gangs, corrupted public servants and the military to coerce small producers into relinquishing titles to their ever more valuable lands in and near urban areas. These historically specific and contingent land grabs draw attention to in situ displacement, where people may remain in place or experience a prolonged multi-stage process of removal. This contrasts with ex situ displacement, a decisive expulsion of people from their homes, communities and livelihoods. In both the char and peri-urban case, we signal new forms of collective action in response to involuntary alienation of land resources in a rapidly and violently transforming political economy. We conclude with a caution against naturalizing displacement, casting it as an 'inevitable' consequence of changing weather conditions in the former and population dynamics in the latter.

No abstract

Human security and environmental security, often reinforcing, can be at odds. One instance arises when greenlining, the creation or expansion of relatively exclusionary protected areas, leads to the mass displacement of local communities and the creation of a new variant of ‘environmental refugees’. The present research employs several methods to estimate the magnitude of environmental refugees in Africa and suggests that they number in the millions. Country‐specific case studies are offered to lend historical context to these estimates. Environmentally oriented land reform is proposed as a partial mitigation for the social side effects of greenlining, and is briefly described in African and other settings. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

It is perhaps commonplace to argue that displacement issues are crucial for understanding processes of global (re)integration and economic change in the twenty-first century. We know, for example, that processes of displacement characterise the restructuring of states and economic sectors, innovative forms of employment and economic subsistence, and the building of modern infrastructure or megaprojects not limited to dams and roadways. We also know that discourses about development increasingly reflect an interest in displacement in conceptualisations of modernity and territorialisation, and in understanding modes of economic, political, and social formations and interventions. Not surprisingly, whether exploring post-colonial states, the globalisation of industrial and military complexes, planned resettlement schemes and infrastructural projects, or the consequences of war and the creation of refugees, we can see communities and solidarities cast asunder in ways that prompt new meanings of belonging, home, identity, citizenship, and rights. These changes make displacement a crucial aspect of contemporary experience.With some notable exceptions, only recently have the social sciences 1 explored questions of place and displacement. In prior thinking, connections to place and movements from it, interactions across place and complex negotiations in place, were often, although not always, assumed. This meant that the concept of place was deployed more as a descriptive than an analytic notion, and generally given only limited theoretical review. It also meant that questions associated with processes of negotiation, and with the capacities of people to make choices about displacement, have often been left unexplored. This is exemplified by demographers who generally emphasise the patterning of population shifts across time and place rather than focus on place or space as both context and analytic.Yet, social science is awakening not only to place, settlement, and movement, but to imposed place, forced resettlement, and involuntary migration. Thomas Gieryn's paper ''A Space for Place in Sociology'' (2000) ranks number four in the accounting of the most read articles in sociology, and Goodchild et al. (2000) correctly identify the analysis of space and place as an increasingly pivotal component of social science research. Demographers also have begun to question the complexities associated with how established and emergent communities sustain networks with their places of origin, as well as construct networks in their new places of residence. Geographers and urban scholars, inspired by feminist analyses, have drawn attention to new configurations of urban communities and the use and meanings of space and place. Cultural anthropologists have identified new theoretical terrain to unsettle the static meaning of location and rethink relationships between people and nation, state, identity, and transnationality. Tying displacement to transnationality also has become a lens for interpreting people's experience as an enactment ...

No abstract