Displacement: Historical and Contemporary Responsibilities for Social Work and Human Services

Introduction

It probably did not require COVID-19 to highlight that the world is experiencing a systemic crisis of global reach and historic scale: one in which economic, social, political, cultural, and ecological crisis nodes are entangled and unfolding in complex and destructive dynamics (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018). However, for a special issue on displacement, and on the historical and contemporary responsibilities that arise from it for social work and human services, the pandemic has brought into even sharper focus what was already an apparent concern: we appear to have entered another age of enmity (Mbembe 2019). This is an era in which borders are (re-)fortified, strangers are (re-)vilified, and dominant discourses contrast starkly with some of the optimism more commonly found in the latter decades of the previous century: not too long ago, the hope flourished that borders would not only be opened for the flows of capital, goods and global elites, but increasingly also to the movement of ordinary people and to progressive ideas in ways that could enable cultural exchanges and political alliances towards a global justice ‘from below’ (see for example, Sewpaul 2006; Fraser 2009).

Undoubtedly, the current crisis raises, anew, age-old questions of what it means to be human, and what a good life requires, and we believe that the concepts of border and place are key concerns in this regard. This special issue is, thus, located in a borderland, which to us, denotes a dis-place. On the one hand, this dis-place appears as that in-between space where one nation-state ends and another begins, and which to cross can be a deadly affair indeed; a space where They are being divided ever-more-brutally-again from Us. On the other hand, and as importantly, the borderland is also a space where it is possible to develop and cultivate nomadic subjectivities; a sense of being in the here-now/there-then/both-and/neither-nor (see for example, Barad 2019; Braidotti 2019; Tlostanova, Thapar-Björkert, and Koobak 2016). It is a space where past, present, and future ways of perceiving and managing human affairs collide and combine to open up possibilities for reconsidering how things might be done differently and, maybe, better. As such, this special issue echoes Karen Barad’s (2019) invitation:

… to a practice of radical hospitality - an opening up to all that is possible in the thickness of the Now in rejecting practices of a-voidance, taking responsibility for injustices, activating and aligning with forces of justice, and welcoming the other in an undoing of the colonizing notion of selfhood rather than as a marker of not us, not me (544).

Displacement and social work and the human services

Traditionally, social work and human services have tended to focus on contemporary, forced migrations. In line with some of these professions’ key normative commitments, writers in this field have tended to take the United Nations, its relevant statutes, and publications as important reference points. The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHRC) was established in 1950 with the intention for it to be disbanded after three years, by which time the work of resettling the large numbers of displaced people following World War Two was expected to be completed. Seventy-one years later, and the UNHCR remains – amid estimates that the number of displaced people has reached 79.5 million, that is, one percent of the world’s population (UNHCR, 2020). This number almost doubled in the past decade alone (UNHCR, 2020), as ‘with more people becoming displaced and fewer being able to return, an increasing number find themselves in protracted and long-lasting displacement situations’ (UNHCR, 2020, 12). The unprecedented impact of the coronavirus pandemic on displaced people is only just emerging, with the UNHCR (2020, 12) suggesting that the global statistics may ‘under-represent the true magnitude of the number of people seeking international protection during the pandemic’.

Questions of definition are vexed when it comes to people movements generally and displacement specifically. As so-called economic migrants, migrants who move for family reunion purposes, refugees and other displaced people often have similar reasons for leaving their country of origin, the distinction between voluntary and forced migration is increasingly viewed as unsustainable (Hölscher 2016; Marfleet 2006). In addition, the growing politicisation of migration has resulted in the tightening of immigration policies and border controls. This has led to increases in irregular migration, including people smuggling and human trafficking, highlighting that the official UNHCR figures are likely to significantly underestimate the numbers of people who are displaced. Alongside the contemporary experiences of displacement is the ongoing impact of historical injustices, such as the slave trade and colonial atrocities, that led to the uprooting and decimation of Indigenous peoples, which cannot be quantified.

Sanctuary and asylum have a long history, yet despite international conventions such as the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1966 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, of which there are 149 state parties, nation states are becoming increasingly hostile to displaced people, and their policies are nothing short of cruel (Nipperess 2018; Rees 2020; UNHCR, 2010). Social workers and human services practitioners work with displaced people at this complex intersection, in contexts that are often antithetical to the values of these professions.

Overview of papers

Given the complexity, extent, and depth of the current crisis of displacement and the opportunities to which it beckons, it is perhaps as unsurprising as it was welcome that this special issue attracted a considerable number of contributions on a wide range of concerns. Seven of these are included in this special issue, ESW Volume 15(1). Focusing on the USA’s southern border, Patrick Farr applies Gayatri Spivak’s seminal work on colonialism and subalternity to explore social work’s historical entanglement in settler colonialism and how this implicates the profession in rendering irregular migrants voiceless. Voicelessness is also a chief concern for Sheron Mpofu, who writes from a position of Zimbabwean citizen and intermittent South African resident. At the intersection of irregular migration and child protection, Mpofu traces social work’s complicity in prevailing regimes of injustice. Proposing, in response, an anti-oppressive framework for a critically-reflexive discourse in this field, it would seem that Mpofu is embarking on just that ‘long road toward hegemony’ which Farr, with Spivak, is calling for.

Achille Mbembe follows the tradition of regarding refugee camps as just one of many examples of how humans, who are considered surplus and a disturbance of a status quo, which is increasingly difficult to maintain, are stored away and kept from sight. The camp, he suggests, has ‘ceased to scandalise’ (Mbembe 2019, 60). Befitting the view that difficulties in maintaining this global status quo signify, in fact, a crisis of capitalism (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018) is Raymond Taruvinga’s, Dorothee Hölscher’s and Antoinette Lombard’s critique of the income generation activities practiced in Zimbabwe’s Tongogara refugee camp. Arguing that the deliberate seclusion of camp-based refugees runs counter to stated development objectives, such as self-reliance and economic independence, they draw, at the same time, attention to these objectives’ ideological function. In the process, the authors demonstrate the potential of a critical ethics of care in helping to re-think mainstream development practice.

Citing Giorgio Agamben’s and Hannah Arendt’s classic explication of statelessness as a state of bare life and, thus, rightlessness, Lynelle Watts and David Hodgson argue that this enables a reconsideration of ‘what it means to be human in a moral and ontological sense’. In this respect, and as social work seeks to respond not just to statelessness but to displacement more generally, Watts and Hodgson continue to see value in both deontological traditions and in democratic constitutionalism. Delphi Carstens and Vivienne Bozalek might disagree that such traditions can be extended to provide adequate guidance in the face of the existential crisis facing not just humans but the world within which they are entangled. Beyond merely bridging concerns of social and environmental justice, they propose feminist new materialism as a way of decentring and reconceptualising the human. In keeping with the idea that the crisis of displacement constitutes, in fact, part of the much deeper and wider crisis of capitalism, Carstens and Bozalek sketch various [s]cenes to trouble and haunt the centrality of the purely human in social work and to contend that the crisis of displacement is a crisis for all forms of life.

Historical depth also charactersises Hyacinth Udah’s contribution, as does his considered embrace of his own positionality as non-Western immigrant Other in Australia. It is from this vantage point that Udah employs the concepts of coloniality of power and border thinking to explore the systemic nature of discrimination in Australian universities. To address the ethical responsibilities of social work and human service educators, he argues for a shift in the ways that non-white (and non-Western) racialised international social work students are constructed - and treated. This perspective is complemented by that of Patrick O’Keeffe and Sharlene Nipperess, who draw on the concepts of space, place and belonging to explore the experience of young refugees in Australia and to argue that nationalistic discourses of identity and citizenship have exacerbated the impacts of their migration. They conclude by suggesting that these concepts offer new opportunities for social work education to explore the interconnectedness between space, place, belonging and identity, especially as it relates to displacement and, in particular, young people’s resettlement.

The question of (re-)settlement is at the heart, too, of Kim Robinson’s and Greer Lamaro, and of Rebecca Field’s, Donna Chung’s and Caroline Fleay’s, respective qualitative studies, both of which focus on the possibilities of ethical everyday practice. Robinson and Lamaro (DOI: 10.1080/17496535.2020.1802502) present key learnings from their work with Syrian and Syriac communities in regional Australia in relation to their concerns about a rapidly shifting funding and policy context. Field, Chung and Fleay (DOI: 10.1080/17496535.2021.1879892) compare social work and human service practice with asylum seekers in Germany and Australia. For all their differences, the authors find that both contexts are characterised by systematic discrimination and restriction, yet individually-focused interventions continue to dominate. Against this background, they encourage social work and human services practitioners to work across the entire personal-political continuum - in spite (or maybe precisely because) of the existing challenges to ethical practice within this field. These two contributions will be published in ESW Vol. 15(4) but are available immediately via the DOI hyperlinks included above.

Conclusion

The purpose of this special issue was not to formulate any pretence of anyone having a solution to these structural problems, that are unfolding often deadly dynamics at a global scale. It was rather to provide an opportunity for authors to select and (re-)consider particular topics, which, for them, were prominent in this unfolding era of (re-)fortified border and yet-again deepening hostilities between Us and Them. Our hope was to attain the greatest-possible scope and depth in their exploration of these (re-)emerging challenges. Drawing on a wide range of ethical theories, traditions and newly emerging discourses, the contributors to this issue took up our call.