Dwelling in The Temporary

ABSTRACT

This article responds to the call from forced migration studies for increased engagement with the mobilities paradigm, as well as to criticism of the mobilities paradigm for not engaging sufficiently with immobility and power relations. The article analyses the experiences and strategies of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in rented dwellings in Tbilisi, in the South Caucasus state of Georgia, who are among the most mobile groups of IDPs in that country. To understand the relationship between mobility and immobility, the article applies Heidegger's notion of ‘dwelling’ and more recent developments of that notion, together with the discussion between Honneth and Fraser on ‘recognition’. First, the article introduces internal displacement in Georgia. Second, it discusses the housing situation for the IDPs. Third, the theoretical concepts of ‘dwelling’ and ‘recognition’ are developed to enable analysis of experiences and practices of mobility and immobility. Fourth, the various trajectories through which IDPs have come into their rented dwellings are discussed, and processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization and the experience of recognition through the dwelling are analysed. The conclusion addresses the role of dwelling and recognition for efforts to understand the relationship between mobility and immobility.

KEYWORDS:

• Internally displaced persons
• renting
• (im)mobility
• dwelling
• recognition
• Tbilisi

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the editors of the special issue, Sybille Frank and Lars Meier for inviting me to contribute and for their constructive comments during the process. I am grateful to all the research participants in Georgia and to Julia Kharasvili of the IDP Women’s Association Consent in Georgia for her hospitality and generosity and for sharing ideas. Thanks to Mariam Naskidashvili and Khathia Kardeva for research assistance and to Nicholas Van Hear for valuable comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Cathrine Brun is Professor at the Department of Geography, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research currently concentrates on protracted displacement and humanitarian practices of relief and recovery after disasters with special emphasis on South Asia and the South Caucasus. Some of her recent publications include: ‘Active waiting, changing hopes: towards time perspective on protracted displacement’ (In Social Analysis, in press); Alternative Development: Unravelling Marginalization, Voicing Change (ed. with P. Blaikie and M. Jones, Ashgate 2014); and ‘“I love my soldier”. Developing responsible and ethically sound research strategies in a militarised society’ (In Research Methods in Conflict Settings. A View from Below, ed. D. Mazurana et al., Cambridge University Press 2013).

Notes

1. I borrow the term ‘paradigmatic victim’ from Chua et al. (2000). It has also been used in the context of refugees by Lubkemann (2008).

2. The ‘regions’ is a term for most areas of Georgia outside Tbilisi and its surroundings.

3. Although it has been impossible to find an official statement declaring that assistance is provided on the basis of where one is registered, this seems to be the common practice.

4. ‘Durable housing solutions’ is a term that plays on the discourse of durable solutions in forced migration, where it refers to attempts to find solutions in which forced migrants cease to be forced migrants. A durable solution is believed to be achieved when internally displaced persons have been integrated into the local community in which they settled after displacement, when they have been resettled and live permanently in another location within their country as local citizens of that place, or when they return to the place from which they were displaced (see Brun 2008 for a discussion of these principles in the context of internal displacement).

5. I use ‘transfer of ownership’ here to distinguish this process from the general ‘privatization’ of property that took place in Georgia from 1992 (following independence). While collective centres were not privatized in the first wave of post-independence privatization, privatization of buildings that housed collective centres and had commercial value has gradually taken place, making IDPs living in such buildings vulnerable and forcing many to move, a subject to which I will return below. There is no information available on how many Georgians currently live in rented dwellings.

6. For example, Honneth's emphasis on authentic identities is problematic in this context. See Zurn (2003) and Bankovsky and Le Goff (2012) for further discussion of Honneth and Fraser's conversations on recognition.

7. Axel Honneth (2002, p. 505) discusses the variation in the meanings of ‘recognition’ between English, French and German. In German, the ‘concept appears to denote essentially only that normative situation associated with awarding a social status, whereas in English and French it encompasses the additional epistemic sense of “identifying” or “knowing again”’.

8. Not her real name.