Social Science Research Council

"An Architecture of Displacement: Spatializing Identity and Refugee Space in Beirut and Calcutta"

Over several decades, international efforts have been made to address issues faced by people displaced by wars, natural disasters and state-led development projects. Currently, an estimated 18 million people in the world are living as refugees, i.e. as people who have crossed international borders due to wars and other atrocities. Many more are believed to be living as displaced persons within the national borders of countries in conditions similar to refugees. According to customary international law, “refugee” is meant to be a temporary status, although many different ethnic and religious groups have lived as refugees for several decades. They inhabit a space that is simultaneously temporary and permanent, governed by multiple and often contradictory legal regimes at the local, national and international level. These refugee spaces lying within the borders of host nations raise questions about citizenship and the politics of space.

Overlapping legal regimes have serious implications for the ability of refugees to exercise their agency and determine their living conditions. How does the refugee camp become a home-land (hyphenated to distinguish between home and land) and what are the implications of searching for such a home for the refugees? How does the host nation manage the relationships between its citizens and those outside and how are these relations articulated at the urban level? What role does domestic space play in this equation?

This dissertation lies at the intersection of the politics of space and the politics of refugeeness and attempts to answer some of these questions. It also bridges the discourses on development, modernization and human rights. The latter has emerged as the main tool through which state sovereignty is constructed. I argue that the complex process of adaptation that the refugees go through after displacement and resettlement is partially dependent on their prospect of developing feelings of belonging to host nation as well. The main proposition of this dissertation is that the prospect of belonging and unbelonging is a dialectical relationship between citizens and non-citizens mediated by the state where the state uses the dichotomy between these two categories to discipline its own citizenry and create a national narrative. The dismal state of refugee living conditions is thus used by governments to make evident to its own citizens these categories.

My project will study the spatizalization of this “othering” process by looking at Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the East Bengali refugees in West Bengal at two different moments: the modernization of the early independence period, and the current era of neoliberal globalization. I will investigate the early phase of modernity corresponding to the consolidation of these two states (a nation state and a state in a republic) by looking at how they dealt with the refugees in the early period. The project will also look at the fate of many of these refugees in the current moment of globalization in both states. I hypothesize that the phenomenon of belonging and unbelonging are manifested in the built environment allowing us to understand how refugees make a home away from home in what I call the “architecture and urbanism of displacement.” To investigate this proposition, I will use these two particular case studies because they are especially important in understanding how two rather different groups have engaged with the host nation in unique ways to create not only a sense of community but also to sustain a politics of identity which may be reflected in the urban spaces they produce or inhabit.