Paper short abstract:

The categories “refugee” and “displaced person” are important to authorities and to people in such situations. It is revealing to not separate those who could not or would not leave from those who must or do. I focus on what is refused to and by all such people to clarify current transformations

Paper long abstract:

The categories "refugee" and "displaced person" are important

to states, lawyers, and relief organizations, and of course of crucial

importance to people trying to live in these situations. But to

understand the transformative processes that are being reshaped, in

the recurrent times and places where impending tomorrows are being

made increasingly less viable for large numbers of people, it is

important not to separate those who could not or would not leave from

those who must or do. This paper uses a grasp on what is refused by

the dominant to all such people when a viable tomorrow is increasingly

denied, and what the victims themselves refuse, far beyond leaving,

Out of this can be developed an expanded sense of fields of struggle.

Not arenas of struggle - that is too neat and too bounded a concept

to grasp the expanding possibilities of evasion, resistance and

confrontation as a viable tomorrow is made to decline.