Paper long abstract:

The relationship between conflict, inequality and human mobility is complex and complicated by the fact that neither is a monolithic phenomenon. Armed conflicts, whether within or between states, produce migration, as well as containment and involuntary immobility (Lubkeman 2008). Post-war political economies produce sustained pressures to migrate that often divide families between different countries and produce the physical absences of relatives that again may invoke memories of wartime losses. Apart from being a mere economic option, international mobility may become the ‘social project of a post-war generation’, a project that in times of enhanced border control may demand ‘as much ingenuity as joining a revolutionary movement must have required’ in earlier generations (McAllister and Nelson 2013: 33). How far those mobilized by war or dispossession become internally displaced, involuntarily immobile, lost en route, or make it to foreign destinations from where they eventually may return (or be returned), generally depends as much on global migration regimes as on the so-called ‘root causes’ of these phenomena. The construction of particular mobility narratives as ‘crisis’ and the crises provoked in families and communities by particular mobility regimes provides fertile ground for critical reflection of the location of anthropological knowledge.