Conceptualising Forced Migration: Praxis, Scholarship and Empirics

Chapter 2 in ‘Forced Migration: Current Issues and Debates’ edited by Alice Bloch and Giorgia Dona. Exploring the label ‘forced migration’, the chapter argues that the increasing saliency of the terminology amongst humanitarian and development stakeholders has not yielded a coherent conceptualisation, whilst the extensive academic literature also reveals an ambiguous and limited discourse on conceptualising the term, and an uneasy relationship to the more familiar but increasingly problematic label refugee. The chapter develops and elaborates an empirically based conceptualisation framed around two parameters – the drivers, and the patterns and processes of forced migration – providing a crucial analytical tool to understand the vulnerabilities, rights and needs of forced migrants, transcending the status-based entitlement of refugee.