Forced Migration
Forced migration refers to the displacement of people from their homes due to factors such as conflict, persecution, or environmental disasters. It often results in the movement of large groups of people across national borders or within their own countries. This phenomenon has significant geographic implications, including the redistribution of populations and the creation of refugee camps and temporary settlements.
6 Key excerpts on "Forced Migration"
eBook - ePubInternational Social Work
Issues, Strategies, and Programs
- David R. Cox, Manohar Pawar(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...The chief causes of displacement—conflict, persecution, violence, or social and political collapse—very often result in multiple and prolonged exposure to extreme stress. While fearing for their lives, refugees also feel a deep sense of humiliation and extreme helplessness. They long not only for a safe haven, food, shelter, and medical first aid, but also for social justice, legal protection, and encouragement to restore their sense of community, their shattered human dignity, and their personal identity. Our own definition of Forced Migration is the following: By Forced Migration, we mean migration situations where a significant force—political, economic, ecological, or social in nature—is exerted on people to leave their habitual place of residence, in circumstances often of extreme stress, resulting in departure for a comparatively unknown destination and under conditions of travel and entry that frequently offer little if any security to those migrating. There are four critical elements in this definition, each of which is of major significance when it comes to responding to the needs of forced migrants. The first element is the existence of a degree of force. People seldom engage in migration lightly, for the majority of people have a strong attachment to a home. The fact that migration is forced will also breed frustration and resentment against the prevailing forces, and make it more difficult to adapt to a new situation because one is there, in a sense, under duress. The second element is that Forced Migration is always associated with a degree of stress, and often extreme stress, which often is the outcome of a period of highly traumatic experiences. The effects of stress and trauma are, therefore, often found among forced migrants. The third element is the fact that the destination is either completely unknown or vague...
eBook - ePubAn Introduction to Population Geographies
Lives Across Space
- Holly R. Barcus, Keith Halfacree(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In other words, a degree of coercion is expressed via everyday economic, cultural, political, family and other relational life course pressures “encouraging” residential relocation. Within what Archer (2003) terms internal conversations, “the ‘internal dialogue’ or ‘self talk’ of individuals as they debate with themselves how they might want to modify themselves and ‘the world as a consequence’” (Evans 2014: 308), migration often becomes the only practical move (sic.) to make. From an everyday practical perspective, therefore, both force and choice—structure and agency—are expressed within all migrations. However, the balance varies considerably between types of migration and within social and embodied variations of each type. In this chapter, Forced Migration refers to geographical displacement whereby individuals, families or larger groups are compelled unwillingly to leave their home and/or region or country as a result of actual or feared severe negative threats. These threats are diverse but typically result in what Fullilove (2004) characterized as “root shock” or “the traumatic stress reaction to the loss of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem” (Fullilove 2014: 142). They range from immediate risks to life, such as war; through perilous racial, ethnic, or political persecution, discrimination or intolerance; to more environmental challenges to life and livelihood, such as droughts, volcanic eruptions, extreme soil degradation and climate change. Once displaced, forced migrants might eventually return “home,” or they might never return but find themselves creating new lives in new locations often distant and culturally distinct from their homes. Forced Migration is always constructed relationally. Thus, for Castles et al...
eBook - ePubGoverning Climate Induced Migration and Displacement
IGO Expansion and Global Policy Implications
- Andrea C. Simonelli, Kenneth A. Loparo(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...Capitalist development causes both pull- and push-based migration. Globalization essentially means flows across borders of capital, commodities, ideas, or people. National governments remain suspicious of the latter two (Castles, 2007). This body of work, however, does not consider the larger sphere of situational influences that can affect a potential migrant. A subsistence farmer who has a poor growing season is not necessarily looking to move into a new career as much as to supplement a current short-term difficulty. The same can be said for the same farmer whose business has dried up due to trade agreements. NAFTA has been a disaster for small farmers in Mexico, increasing rural poverty. An estimated two million Mexican corn farmers have been forced out of business by cheaper, subsidized US imports (Belton and Morales, 2009). These examples and their implications begin to question the extent to which migration is purely voluntary in the sense of economic maximization or is forced based on prevailing outside influences. This discrepancy will be discussed further in the next chapter. 1 Forced Migration as a field of study Forced Migration studies is a subfield of migration studies. It is concerned with the types of “push” factors which drive migrants to leave their homes. This also includes studies on displacement types, such as disaster induced displacement, development induced displacement, environmental displacement, and all those labeled refugees. 2 The main debate within this subfield is whether refugee studies should be part of Forced Migration studies or be a separate field of study. Hathaway (2007) argues that marrying refugee studies with Forced Migration studies will take away from the special circumstances of refugees and encourage work on the phenomenon itself instead of on refugee rights...
eBook - ePubMigration Theory
Talking across Disciplines
- Caroline B. Brettell, James F. Hollifield, Caroline B. Brettell, James F. Hollifield(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...6 Geographical Theories of Migration Exploring Scalar, Spatial, and Placeful Dimensions of Human Mobility Marie Price DOI: 10.4324/9781003121015-7 Geography is a discipline closely associated with maps and spatial reasoning. Maps, especially thematic ones, challenge us to visualize spatial distribution of phenomena across space and over time at various scales. Anything that is unevenly distributed is eminently mappable and thinking in maps invites us to consider spatial arrangements. The varied movement of people has been an irresistible subject for geographical inquiry and theorization since the inception of the modern discipline. Why is a cluster of migrants located in one place and not another? How are clusters linked through networks and how do these distributions influence space and place? What structural or environmental forces are driving human mobility? Mapping forces one to select a scale of analysis; consequently, geographers have a proclivity to shift scales, from the local to the global, and even jump scale when necessary. Not limited to any single container of convenience, such as the territorial state, geographers consider various socio-legal containers when theorizing about migration from neighborhoods, to cities, to meta-regions such as Europe or Africa. Geographic scholarship is increasingly interested in how these containers are enforced, deformed, and reconstituted in response to migration. Finally, geography is concerned with a deeper understanding of context and placemaking, seeing space as layered with information such as: the physical environment, the ethnic composition of residents, and their socioeconomic well-being. Human mobility is often a response to and a catalyst for these layers, and thus the social and environmental contexts of areas of departure and reception invite geographical theorization. This chapter will consider some of the foundational theories that shape geographical understandings of migration and human mobility...
eBook - ePub- Patricia Hynes(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The reasons why people migrate are invariably complex, and separating social, economic or political reasons is extremely difficult. In Key Thinker Box 1.2, Anthony Richmond outlines how a distinction between voluntary and involuntary migration is not useful, but is in fact ‘misleading’ and ‘untenable’ because of the degree to which ‘all human behaviour is contained and enabled’ (1998:20). This forced or involuntary element has been outlined by many others and should be a constant consideration for you as you learn about this topic. Overall, migration studies has historically not always drawn on broader social science theory and concepts. Therefore, when studying Forced Migration, drawing on theories from the field of social science is advised. Migration studies is necessarily an inter-disciplinary exercise, so work from human geography, sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, psychology, history and other academic disciplines is key to offering explanations for causes, patterns and consequences of migration. Key Thinker Box 1.2 Anthony Richmond – Global Apartheid Anthony Richmond’s (1994) seminal text – Global Apartheid – examines the impact of post-industrialism, postmodernism and globalisation in relation to ‘international migration, racial conflict and ethnic nationalism’. Locating refugees within population movements following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he notes how Western European countries were – more than 20 years ago – taking ‘severe measures to deter and exclude spontaneous arrivals of asylum seekers’ (1994:xi)...
eBook - ePub- Dina Ionesco, Daria Mokhnacheva, François Gemenne(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Frequent smaller-scale disasters and their impacts are often under-reported, and the number of people thus affected is likely to be highly underestimated in the global figures. Source: IDMC (2015) Forced or voluntary? In practice it is difficult to clearly distinguish between forced and voluntary migration, which complicates the implementation of appropriate political responses. Certain forms of mobility are chosen, whereas others comprise an element of coercion when disasters, violence, insecurity or the privation of means of subsistence occur, threatening survival and forcing departure, Environmental migration can comprise elements of both. A continuum: from voluntary migration to Forced Migration It is, however, difficult to establish a clear distinction between forced and voluntary migration. In the majority of cases, migrants have an element of choice. The multiplicity of factors involved should be taken into account in order to determine the more or less forced nature of mobility – whether it is the presence of social capital, access to information and the appreciation of risks, etc. – and to better understand certain people's inability to resort to migration as a response to natural hazards – for indeed, this solution is not available to everyone. Often the most vulnerable, either because they are the most exposed or because they are the most destitute, do not have the means to migrate despite wanting to do so. Immobility is thus also more or less voluntary or forced...
