Moving targets: displacement, impoverishment, and development^*

Abstract

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 ...

Everyday realities of climate change adaptation in Mozambique

“…This means that people would have to reinvent themselves in a 'modern lifestyle' of taxation, lined cement houses, associational life and market integration (cf. Downing, 1996Downing, , 2002Feldman et al, 2003;Oliver-Smith, 2005).…”

Environmental resettlement and development, on the steppes of Inner Mongolia, PRC

“…As development, the concept refers to a process -the means through which social structures change. Sen (2000) makes this distinction explicit and Feldman et al (2003) refer to a similar distinction between poverty as state and poverty as process. A second level of ambiguity arises from disputes over the meaning or the measures of well-being and of social change.…”

“…Thus we follow such authors as Rist (1997) and Feldman et al (2003) in making the empirical claim that, in the modern world, development (process) typically occurs through the making of capitalist methods of production: the emergence and generalisation of markets, the creation of capital and the making of a working class. In this view, the outcomes that writers on development typically value -physical wellbeing, economic security, control over one's lifeworld, participation in decision making, security of identity, equality and the like -are, if they occur at all, actually effects (perhaps incidental) of the emergence of capitalism.…”

Competing for Coffee Space: Development‐Induced Displacement in the Central Highlands of Vietnam*

“…1 Understanding the DID, which the latter now face, requires greater attention to social exclusion and its consequences on income and other welfare measures. Specifically, research must move beyond the spatially referenced, forced migration framework, even where its within-state presence is conceded, to include in situ dispossession of property rights, welfare, and cultural identity (Feldman, Geisler, and Silberling 2003). In the absence of this approach, it is tempting to uncritically see the ethnic collateral damage of ''agricultural modernization'' as a naturalized, market-mediated transformation that is in no way problematic.…”