Displacement & Detainment

As people are forcefully displaced, they are also detained – in prison camps, labor camps, refugee camps; in immigration or refugee processing centers; in cities that were supposed to be temporary stops on longer journeys. 

The word “refugee” often conjures up images of a restless people on the move. Legal definitions, rooted in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, support this image by defining refugees as “stateless.” In reality, refugees often find themselves involuntarily tethered to a single place for years – or decades.

How can the concept of “refugeehood” negotiate this paradox of displacement and detainment? Perhaps, rather than being understood by legal definitions, refugees can and should be better understood through their own experiences. What does it mean for them to be simultaneously displaced and detained? Amidst the most dehumanizing circumstances, how do they find ways to survive, to live?