When Home Is a Camp

Bibliographic Data

ID2923917
AuthorsKalpana Rahita Seshadri, K Seshadri (0000-0002-6788-7860, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume26
Issue1
Pages29-58
Publication date2008-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Text (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0164-2472 • E-ISSN: 1527-1951
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/01642472-2007-018
OpenAlexW1967680144
LanguageEN
Citations received5

Analyses of globalization usually ignore the category of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) to focus instead on transnational migrants. This essay argues that a close look at the humanitarian conceptualization of IDPs provides an understanding of the operations of global sovereignty. Global sovereignty is here taken as the enmeshing of three forces: the neoliberal state and its abdication of fundamental responsibilities to citizens, the hand of the global economy in civil war, and the role of international law. The author suggests that contemporary global sovereignty is fundamentally bio-political insofar as it engenders the conditions of possibility for displacement through the transformations it effects on the traditional nation state, and then offers a salve for displacement through the empty form of humanitarian law. Between the abdication of national responsibility and the emptiness of humanitarian law, the displaced person, who is a complex political actor, is entirely depoliticized and rendered unintelligible. The largely ignored program of ethnic cleansing in Gujarat, India, in 2000 provides an example of this now routine process of sovereignty

Abdication · Globalization · Internally displaced person · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · Sovereignty · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub