Transnational refugees
Understanding integration and return
International understanding of repatriation is based on the assumption
that populations tend to seek integration in one primary place of residence.
Is there evidence of an alternative to the return or non-return of displaced
people?
The case of post-conflict Mozambican return from South Africa demonstrates
how this assumption ignores the growing phenomenon of transnationality
in which life strategies are actually based on developing deep social
ties and economic activity in multiple locations, often in different countries.
Such life strategies imply that return and non-return may not be mutually
exclusive options – a possibility that the governments and international
agencies and organisations that formulate and implement refugee policy
generally have not considered.
This article draws on research conducted from 1996-2001 with Mozambicans
who had been displaced from the Machaze district during the country’s
civil war. The Machaze area was one of the first districts in Mozambique
to become fully involved in the civil war that raged between 1979 and
1992, resulting in the displacement of up to 70% of the area’s population
in highly gender-specific ways. Most men fled to South Africa. Women were
far more likely to be displaced internally or to move across the border
into Zimbabwe.
International assistance not only provided a substitute for lost household
agricultural subsistence, but also allowed these men to take advantage
of new social opportunities in South Africa. During the war, Machazian
men increasingly sought to marry South African women without, however,
dissolving their marriages in Mozambique. Prior to the war, polygynous
marriage (one man with multiple wives) was common in Machazian society.
During the war, polygyny was ‘transnationalised’. Thus they
effectively secured themselves against the risks of economic and political
insecurity in Mozambique and South Africa.
The wartime devastation and post-conflict political uncertainties in
Mozambique reinforced the attractiveness of these strategies after the
war. Thus while 89 per cent of the Machazian men interviewed for this
study in 1998 planned to return to Mozambique, most also intended to maintain
social and economic options in South Africa: 79 per cent planned to keep
a house and 72 per cent a business in South Africa after ‘returning’
to Mozambique, while 47 per cent had pension plans in South Africa which
they regularly collected in person. After the war, transnational polygyny
flourished as 23 per cent reported spouses only in Mozambique, 26 per
cent only in South Africa, while 37 per cent had spouses in both countries.
This case demonstrates how transnationality can challenge fundamental
premises of the current international refugee regime. Clearly its post-war
assumptions which view ‘return’ and ‘non-return’
as mutually exclusive options in the formulation of repatriation policy
did not capture the reality that Machazian men themselves reacted to.
Low rates of participation in official UNHCR return efforts, a preference
for avoiding official scrutiny, and the ‘revolving door syndrome’
(in which many who did return ‘came back’ to South Africa)
all showed Machazian men’s resistance to return policies that put
at risk new transnational possibilities.
Many of the essential conditions that helped produce transnationality
among Machazians are not foreign to other displacement contexts, suggesting
that the processes described here may have a broader relevance. These
factors include:
- pre-displacement histories of labour migration associated with gendered
divisions of labour
- robust informal labour markets in peri-urban host settings
- conditions of pervasive insecurity in both countries of origin and
host societies that encourage the development of strategies of risk
diversification
- prolonged armed conflict
- porous international borders.
Transnationality is arguably one of the most effective of the range of
risk-diversification strategies available to displaced populations under
these conditions. Ultimately, the terms in which transnationals conceive
of and live out their own lives clash with predominant ‘statist’
prescriptions that citizens ‘belong’ to one and only one nation-state,
and with repatriation policies that strive to transpose this idea onto
the residence, social lives, legal status and economic activity of displaced
populations. However, it is also important to note that such novel risk
diversification strategies may not work equally well for all segments
of society and may even create new forms of vulnerability. In Machaze,
some women have benefited from participating in these new household arrangements,
yet many others have suffered as a result of the diverting of important
resources to their husband’s new families in South Africa. These
vulnerabilities have prevented some internally displaced women from returning
home and even produced new forms of post-conflict ‘displacement
in place’.
There are a number of implications for policy-makers. Firstly, they need
to consider carefully what ‘return’ actually means to the
displaced. Prolonged displacement in particular is likely to result in
new social and economic ties to areas of self-settlement. However, these
new ties do not necessarily imply a diminished interest in re-establishing
connections to areas of origin. Displaced persons who are survivors of
prolonged and chronic conflicts are likely to engage in risk diversification
strategies based on ‘translocalist’ strategies – whether
across international borders or even internally between urban and rural
areas.
Secondly, policy-makers need to investigate and understand the dynamics
of transnationality and other translocalist strategies in order to:
- better interpret the meaning of both cross-border movements and apparent
‘non-return’
- assess the meaning of demographic distributions used for post-conflict
reconstruction planning
- identify groups that may be rendered more (or less) vulnerable as
a result of these strategies.
Stephen C. Lubkemann
Department of Anthropology
George Washington University
2110 G. St.
N.W. Washington DC
20052
USA
T +1 202 994 4191
F +1 202 994 6097
Stephen_Lubkemann@brown.edu
or
sl02@gwu.edu
See also
‘The Transformation of Transnationality Among Mozambican Migrants
in South Africa’, in Canadian Journal of African Studies, Vol 34
No. 1: 41-63, S. Lubkemann, 2000
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