Suchergebnisse

We all know that conflict creates displacement. Life becomes untenable in different ways, and people are forced to move; the majority ending up as internally displaced people within the nation-state, while others wind up in refugee camps in neighboring countries, and a very few seek asylum in faraway places. The recent war in Ukraine and the conflict in Syria since 2011 seemingly fit into this classical conception of why and how people are displaced. Sudden violent events forced them to run for their lives. Often, we perceive the flight as a one-way movement in space and time, as people move from hot spaces in search of cool ground. However, the journeys are most often more complicated—even in seemingly straightforward cases like Ukraine and Syria. Decisions to move are made gradually, in steps and at times in leaps, sometimes stopping along the way, at other times being temporarily reversed, as individuals and families continue to engage with the conflict, assessing its potential to diffuse, escalate or morph into something else (Bredeloup 2012; Collyer and de Haas 2012). This collection engages closely with these processes as they unfold in the intimate sphere of family and friends while keeping in mind that the conflict in Syria is still there and it still plays an active role in displaced Syrians' present lives and plans for futures.

Over the past two decades, I have done ethnographic fieldwork amongst Burundians in Burundi and in exile, exploring the different ways they deal with the violence that the country has witnessed over the decades. In this article I follow my tracks back and forth and in and out of the country, reflecting on the advantages and challenges of long-term engagement. At a conceptual level, I propose that while violence is indeed lodged in a social context, violent events create a momentary temporal rupture, thereby dislodging meaning from its local context of understanding. My methodological contribution is to explore how long-term engagements, revisits, and diachronic comparisons in ethnography may help us understand violence and violent events. I explore how violent events have affected the past, the present, and the future, causing those who experience it to reorient their understanding not only of their pasts but also of their anticipations for the future.

AbstractThrough the lens of Burundians who have been displaced by the recent crisis in Burundi and their anticipations of possible futures for themselves and their country, expressed in the emotions of hope, anxiety, and despair, this article explores the shift from a situation characterized by upheaval towards the crystallization of authoritarian rule in Burundi. Drawing on ethnographic research amongst Burundian refugees in Rwanda, I examine how these individuals negotiate such uncertain and unpredictable circumstances as well as how emotions of hope, anxiety, and despair change accordingly. I argue that the political closure in Burundi has produced a gradual shift from productive anxiety in the Kierkegaardian sense towards despair and a feeling of existential closure. In such situations, when uncertainty gives way to a certainty that there are no futures, the present becomes detached from the flow of time and decisions become impossible to make. The Burundians in Rwanda can only live for the moment and hope against hope, often evoking a distinction between their hopelessness as human beings and the hope that they are compelled to have as Christians.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Burundian refugees living clandestinely in Nairobi and living in a refugee camp in Tanzania, the article argues that displacement can be about staying out of place in order to find a place in the world in the future. I suggest that the term displacement describes this sense of not only being out of place but also being en route to a future. Burundians in the camp and the city are doing their best to remain out of place, in transition between a lost past and a future yet to come, and the temporary nature of their sojourn is maintained in everyday practices. Such everyday practices are policed by powerful actors in the camp and are ingrained in practices of self-discipline in Nairobi. Comparing the two settings demonstrates that remaining out of place can take on different forms, according to context.

ABSTRACTThis contribution explores the attempts by international humanitarian agencies and the post‐genocide Rwandan state respectively to deal with exceptionality created by the genocide and return to normality. It does so by comparing two kinds of camps that deal with exceptional life: the refugee camps for Hutu who fled after the genocide and the Rwandan government's ingando re‐education camps. While there are resemblances between the exceptional space of refugee camps and the ingando camps, there are also subtle differences. While the international community is attempting to create universal citizens out of 'bare life', the Rwandan state is attempting to create good citizens by exorcizing a concrete historical moment of violence; the Hutu who enter the ingando are perceived as what I term 'bad life'. In this sense, the Rwandan state's concept of a new beginning differs from universalist claims to transitional justice in that it is specific, political and at times violent. Creating a new Rwanda is a political project which involves casting the country in a specific image.