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Refugees and Others Enduring Displacement: Structural Injustice, Health, and Ethical Place-Making

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Refugee Camps in Europe and Australia

Abstract

As states persist in conceiving of asylum as a privilege rather than an entitlement, vast numbers of people displaced by conflict, disaster, famine, and dire poverty continue to dwell over long periods of time in conditions of isolation and severe deprivation. In this chapter, we contribute to the argument that long-term displacement—the fact of it and its management in settings such as refugee camps—is a manifestation of and perpetuates global structural injustice. Along with others, we argue that the systems and processes established for addressing displacement and shelter: (1) profoundly undermine equal opportunity; (2) contribute to a loss of political community, identity, and agency among displaced people; and (3) obscure privilege from the privileged. We argue the ideal and practice of ethical place-making (EPM) has rich potential to respond to structural and global injustice in this context. EPM, understood here as a remedial responsibility, can mitigate the harms of encampment and segregation in urban enclaves. It can also serve as a catalyst in reforming the structures and processes that generate injustices and in forging ties of solidarity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the following sections, we will focus on the effects segregation has on individual refugees. We will not discuss the larger geo-political significance of camps and their potentially negative externalities such as prolongation of civil war (Wood & Sullivan, 2015; Narang, 2015).

  2. 2.

    The segregation literature discusses how segregation not only occurs in relation to the residence of the refugees, but on multiple scales such as leisure, workplace, or social media (Van Ham & Tammaru, 2016).

  3. 3.

    We acknowledge the great efforts and individual successes of current art projects with refugees (See e.g. Espiritu & Duong, 2018).

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Acknowledgment

This chapter has previously been published in Journal of Social Philosophy 52 (June 2021): 234-250, https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12387. It is reprinted here with friendly permission from Wiley, the journal publisher.

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Eckenwiler, L., Wild, V. (2022). Refugees and Others Enduring Displacement: Structural Injustice, Health, and Ethical Place-Making. In: Razum, O., Dawson, A., Eckenwiler, L., Wild, V. (eds) Refugee Camps in Europe and Australia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12877-6_7

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