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Development Displacement

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By Phillip Cole

Forced displacement happens when people have to leave their homes against their will and move to another area to be safe from harm, or are forcibly driven or moved from their homes. Although most people think of forcibly displaced people as refugees fleeing political violence, they in fact make up a small proportion of the total – by May 2024 UNHCR estimated there were 43.4 million refugees in the world out of a total of 120 forcibly displaced people. Even then UNHCR only counts people displaced by some form of conflict, and so are not counting those displaced by disasters, or by development projects. According to the most reliable estimates, between 10 and 15 million people are displaced by development projects, such as dams and major infrastructure projects, every year (see de Haas et al 2019), and so they are a major cause of forced displacement, and yet one that is rarely discussed.

Where development displacement is talked about it is usually to set out conditions for what counts as informed consent and whether some projects are so important that forced removal of people without their consent is justified. However, a more radical approach is to see development displacement as a dimension of state formation in the form of colonization of the margins or borderlands, where those margins or borderlands can be located anywhere within the state territory.

Historically, a central element of state formation has been the violent expulsion of those not considered to be proper members of the nation in order to control over territory for exploitation. This violent process of state formation is an on-goingis on-going process of colonization, with states establishing their power and sovereignty, and it is a process that continues to be oppressive and violent to populations seen as marginal. Development projects are a key means of establishing opening up ‘empty’  land for exploitation and Indigenous peoples in particular have been victimised through this process.

Numbers:
There are no reliable figures available for development displaced people because no agency is counting them. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, a trusted source of data on internal displacement, does not include them in its estimates. “Data is sparse and difficult to obtain … There is currently no global estimate of the scale of displacement associated with development projects” (IDMC 2019a). However: “such projects have historically forced large numbers of people off their land ‘in the public interest’ across the world, as states exercise their power to further development through compulsory acquisition based on the legal principle of eminent domain” (IDMC 2019b). 

Drawing on the work of Micheal Cernea, the leading authority on development displacement, Christopher McDowell estimates that between 280 million and 300 million people have been displaced and involuntarily resettled over the past 20 years because of public and private sector development projects (McDowell 2014) – but “this number is likely to be a significant underestimate” because of under-reporting.

Impact:
The impacts of being displaced by development projects are very similar to other forms of forced displacement. Cernea identifies these as landlessness, joblessness, homelessness, marginalisation, food insecurity, increased morbidity and mortality, loss of common property, and community disarticulation (Cernia 2021). Bennett and McDowell define  community disarticulation as “the tearing apart of social structures, interpersonal ties, and the enveloping social fabric as a result of forced resettlement.” It results in people “losing power over their lives and being unable to alter or even influence the course of events,” and experiencing “the psychological distress caused by grieving for lost places …” (Bennett and McDowell 2012).

However, there is one distinctive impact of development displacement – while refugees and other displaced people often believe they will one day return to their homes, for the development displaced this is not something they can hope for; their homes have been completely destroyed to make way for reservoirs, shopping centres, sports stadiums, or transport hubs.

Massacre:
Development displacement is a violent process, not just systemic or structural violence, but direct physical violence in the form of murders and massacres. Berta Cáceres, an Indigenous leader in Honduras, was murdered in 2016 bbecause of her campaign to stop the construction of an internationally funded dam that would have destroyed land regarded as sacred by her people. In 2021 Robert David Castillo was found guilty of her murder. He was a US-trained former army intelligence officer and president of the hydro electric company behind the proposed dam. Berta was shot dead by hired assassins, who were convicted in 2018 (see Lakhani, N. 2010)..

But as well as individual assassinations, there have been massacres. A notorious example is the Chixoy dam  in Guatemala, a project funded by the World Bank, which eventually flooded 50 kilometres of land displacing 3,500 people. The local Indigenous people were not consulted and were subsequently persecuted with a number of massacres taking place, killing approximately 400 men, women and children (see Colajacomo 1999). 

Such violence continues today. Front Line Defenders publishes yearly reports on the persecution of human rights defenders, and in its 2024 report identifies at least 300 who were killed the previous year. Nearly one third of those were Indigenous people’s rights defenders, by far the most targeted group, as they attempt to resist infrastructure projects that do not acknowledge their presence.

Gentrification:
Gentrification in in major cities has produced urban displacement, “a form of un-homing that violently severs the connection between people and place” (Elliott-Cooper et al 2020). This kind of displacement is never a one off event, but a series of events that unfold over time, creating confusion and anxiety. It can be years between the announcement of redevelopment and anything happening, and during that period neighbourhoods can ‘desertify’ as services shut down.  “In such cases, the life of residents is effectively suspended: there is no longer any incentive to improve the neighbourhood, nor is it clear how they should plan for the future. They are effectively trapped in the present, and displaced before the event” (Elliott-Cooper et al 2020). Mindy Fullilove identifies what she calls root shock – “… a shock that rips apart people’s social networks and relationships” (Fullilove 2004).

This form of displacement in major cities in the global North has led some to ask why most discussions of forced displacement focus on the global South. There is, argues Anna Wherry (2015), a hidden humanitarian logic here that defines the figure of the forcibly displaced person as located elsewhere in the world but not ‘here’. Putting urban projects, whereverwhere ever they occur, within our debates about forced displacement makes important connections across the globe between peoples experiencing the same impacts of development, and opens up possibilities for networks of solidarity, so that they develop their own agency and their own forms of resistance to displacement, rather than relying on the ‘international community’ to protect them.

Sources

Bennett, O. and C. McDowell (2012), Displaced: The Human Cost of Development and Resettlement.

Cernea, M. (2021), ‘The Risks and Reconstruction Model for Resettling Displaced Populations’, in M. Kock-Weser and S. Guggenheim (eds), Social Development in the World Bank: Essays in Honor of Michael M. Cernea.

Colajacomo, J. (1999), “The Chixoy Dam: The Maya Achi Genocide”, Contributing Paper to the World Commission on Dams, Cape Town, South Africa.

de Haas, H. S. Castles and M. J. Miller (2019), The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (London: REd Globe Press).

Elliott-Cooper, A., P. Hubbard and L. Lees (2020), ‘Moving Beyond Marcuse: Gentrification, Displacement and the Violence of Un-homing’, Progress in Human Geography.

Fullilove, M. (2004), Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighbourhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It.

Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Grid 2019: Global Report on Internal Displacement 2019.

Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Methodological Index 2019.

Lakhani, N. (2010), Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet (London: Verso).

McDowell, C. (2014), ‘Development Created Population Displacement’, in E. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, G. Loescher, K. Long and N. Sigona (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies.

Wherry, A. (2015), ‘Forced Migration in the “First World”: Questioning the Logics of a Humanitarian Concept’, Refugee Studies Centre Working Paper Series No. 110.

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