Abstract
In this article, we analyze and then conceptually combine separately developed frameworks of displacement in urban and migration research. We consider internationally displaced migrants’ continued and multiplied experiences of displacement in cities and urban areas as an entry point through which to explore the intersections between international and urban displacement. In doing so, we move beyond disciplinary divides and take some preliminary conceptual and analytical steps toward developing a more rigorous, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive framework of displacement: one that enables us to see connections, similarities, and differences between a variety of displacement processes, forms, and experiences.
Keywords
Introduction
Displacement is at the very core of two separate fields, urban studies and migration studies. Yet, even though displacement is strongly connected to urbanization processes, which are more often than not the starting point for dispossession and global forced migrations (Van Vliet et al., 2017), both urban and (forced) migration research usually work with separately developed frameworks and understandings of displacement. The “where,” “why,” and “how” of displacement—in relation to scales, locations, and geographies (including “Global South” and “Global North” divides), as well as the causes and spatial processes of displacement—appear to be disciplinarily occupied and assigned. In urban studies, displacement has become a core concept used in researching neighborhood-based processes, such as urban renewal (Fried, 1966) and gentrification (Marcuse, 1985). In the former, displacement causes “root shock” due to the loss of home and community (see Fullilove, 2004). In the latter, urban displacement is understood as the “dark side” of gentrification (Baeten et al., 2017, 645); a result of the commodification and financialization of land, housing, and urban (re)development projects that remove disadvantaged, poor, and often racialized urban residents from neighborhoods (Atkinson, 2000; Lees, 2014; Smith, 1996). Migration (and forced migration) research appears to be concerned with broader processes of coercion and expulsion at the scale of regions or countries, triggered by geopolitical conflicts, wars, natural and environmental disasters, climate change, development, or the persecution of certain groups. These processes result in internal (within a country) and/or cross-border movement, including the international displacement of people (Adey et al., 2020; Hyndman, 2000; Koser and Martin, 2011).
In urban studies and migration studies research, urban and international displacement processes are for the most part conceptualized separately from one another. Urban scholars tend to meticulously theorize urban development-related displacement, while describing international and migration-related forms and processes as the “other” displacement. Or they neglect them entirely. In a recent article, Watt and Morris (2024), try “putting urban displacement in its place,” explaining that their focus is exclusively on “urban displacement which involves forced population movement from established housing and neighbourhoods arising from urban redevelopment processes and landlord actions, rather than displacement occurring due to wars, climate change, ‘natural’ disasters or migration” (162, our emphasis). The “latter displacement drivers,” they argue, “are associated with forced migration in relation to refugees and as such fall under the generic term ‘displacement studies’.” This suggests that urban processes of displacement, their roots, causes, means, and experiences, are divorced from ones related to forced migration and the production of refugees. Similarly, Hirsh and colleagues (2020) who inspired Watt and Morris, establish a framework for urban displacement through which they position the experience of being displaced at the center of conceptualization, explaining that this experience “has shared global qualities” (Hirsh et al., 2020, 391, own emphasis). However, their attempt at “bridging the gaps in displacement literature between the global south and the global north” (Hirsh et al., 2020, 391) creates new ones, for their work is silent on international migration, conflict-driven and global displacement processes (despite them citing UNHCR statistics on migration-related displacement to underline their case), including those that are taking place right on their doorsteps in occupied Palestine.
The problem in such work is that, first, displacement is disentangled from the broader structures of coercion, forced movement, and dispossession under global and racialized capitalism which “dispossess nonmigrant white workers of the Global North of their jobs, homes, and futures” and “also creates the multiple processes of dispossession which expel people of the Global South from their land, livelihood, or homeland” (Glick Schiller, 2021, 19). This impedes studying the underlying and shared causes for displacement relevant for understanding the processes and logics through which displacement occurs. Second, when focusing on the effects and realities of displacement, the separation of these bodies of work is problematic, as both international (from migration studies) and urban (from urban studies) displacement exemplify shared characteristics, qualities, and displacee experiences. In both fields, displacement is conceptualized as an inherently spatial and involuntary process that materially and affectively ruptures the connection between places and people, communities and heritages, individuals and memories. It results in the loss of home, familiar surroundings, social and community networks, sources of livelihood, and in forced movement. It stretches and unfolds over time, involves coercion, and leads to expulsion, deprivation, destitution; physical, social, and emotional uprooting, and “unhoming” (Ali, 2023; Astolfo, 2023; Brickell et al., 2017; Elliott-Cooper et al., 2020; McDowell and Morrell, 2010; Miraftab, 2014; Yiftachel, 2020). In short, both international and urban forms of displacement result in people being removed from and dispossessed of their home(s)—and home environment—against their will. Consequently, “there are important parallels to be drawn between the experiences of those being displaced within cities and those of international refugees and migrants who make homes while in a state of ‘limbo’” (Elliott-Cooper et al., 2020, 503). This is specifically relevant for studies in the Global South, where, as Sanyal (2025) argues, displacement has created the urban condition through internal/urban and international displacement.
Both forms move even closer together and overlap when we follow the movement and trajectories of people being internationally displaced and moving to cities, where they face “repeated displacement” (Cottyn, 2018), and “circuitous displacement” (Bhagat, 2021), as they find, make and then lose their home again (Belloni and Massa, 2022). Consequently, we argue that similarities and shared experiences of displacement, and the reality of coinciding displacements justify the intellectual task of examining them in the round (McDowell and Morrell, 2010, 3), and in taking them as an entry point to structure and theorize the intersections of displacement processes, forms, and experiences.
To do this, we work with Jabareen’s (2009) conceptual analysis method and Hart’s (2006) relational comparison, to “generate, identify, and trace a phenomenon’s major concepts” (Jabareen, 2009, 53) in a relational-comparative fashion. We then integrate these into an exploratory conceptual framework, expanding existing concepts (see e.g., Ali, 2023; Hirsh et al., 2020) by bridging urban and migration studies ideas through a focus on displacement structures, processes, and experiences. First, we analyze the different disciplinary bodies of writing on displacement. Attempting to improve conceptual clarity, we trace the concepts established in urban studies and migration studies and bridge their understanding of, and approaches to, studying displacement. Second, we consider the example of internationally displaced migrants moving to urban areas. We do so, because internationally displaced migrants navigate the intersections of scalar processes, dynamics, and forms of displacement. In simplified terms, they are displaced from their home and within/from their home country, they are forced to deal with and cross (and/or are pushed back multiple times by) regional (e.g., EU) and national borders, and arrive to a large degree in cities. These movements and trajectories themselves include processes and experiences of displacement and expulsion, which multiply in cities as internationally displaced migrants have to traverse “urban spaces marked by growing levels of internal displacement (evictions and homelessness)” (Soederberg, 2019, 924) and are therefore “doubly displaced,” first, from their country of origin and then within spaces of settlement and housing markets (Lees and Hubbard, 2022, 354). Therefore, internationally displaced migrants “bring together,” and navigate, several displacement processes, which, we argue, makes studying their movements, trajectories, experiences, and urban geographies a strategic starting point through which to theorize the intersections and similarities of these displacements.
In this article, we develop the idea of “multiplied displacement”—as a framework to explain the proliferating assemblage of the repeated loss and lack of home, connected through broader processes of racialization, governance, and the capitalist mode of production. This approach enables us to lay bare the underlying structures of the “multiplicity of forms of displacement” (Adey et al., 2020, 4), the experiences of the variety of the displaced, and the increasingly interwoven means, practices, and spaces through which they are governed. The purpose of this article is not to deliver an all-compassing, everything-explained concept that provides a satisfying theory of displacement applied to all cases, experiences, and processes related to displacement. This would risk “homogenizing people’s experiences of (forced) mobilities, thus generating a reductive view of the multiple axes of individuals’ identities” (Bakonyi and Chonka, 2023, 14). Rather, this article is an attempt to foster a discussion about the potential of making the unseen connections of displacement processes visible by combining existing approaches in urban and migration research and some of our own original ideas. Our focus is on the structural components and processes relevant for displacement to take place and for theorizing the reality of displacements in the twenty-first century more accurately.
Displacement in migration studies and urban studies
Academic interest in the processes (and consequences) of displacement was the starting point for the development of both migration studies and urban studies. Indeed, both bodies of research have similar origins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. For example, Ravenstein’s (1885, 1889) seminal work, “Laws of Migration,” is largely concerned with urbanization, the movement from the countryside to cities, and the role of urban centers of commerce and industry in attracting rural and international migrants. Similarly, urban research arose from interest in the growth of urban areas through different forms of migration and the study of racialized groups, as well as their poor housing conditions and struggles in “the ghetto” or in “slum communities,” with this research most prominently developed by Friedrich Engels, W.E.B. Du Bois, and—some decades later—within the Chicago School. Without directly conceptualizing displacement, some of the processes explained in these early works essentially describe it: the “transplanting [of] millions of Africans” (Du Bois, [1935] 2017, 27), their enslavement and then continued forced movements within the US, to cities, displacement within cities, and segregation in neighborhoods in Du Bois’ oeuvre; the often forced international migration and dispossession of rural migrants moving to cities in Ravenstein’s work; Engels’ writings on the forced emigration of rural Irish workers to cities in England where they were then “forced out of the center of the town, toward the outskirts” as a result of urban development projects (Engels, [1887] 1979, 17); and the Chicago School research on “invasion” and “succession” processes used to describe neighborhood population changes and displacements in relation to the arrival of migrants, including the internationally displaced and persecuted (see e.g., Zorbaugh, [1929] 1976). In short, early urban and migration research is traversed by examples of: (1) the (forced) migration of the internationally displaced (more often migrating to cities in the north); (2) the mass expulsion, dispossession, and displacement of rural populations to cities; and (3) urban displacement in cities as a result of segregation, marginalization, racialization, and—mainstreaming globally today—processes of gentrification.
Contextualizing these works, they hint at broader processes of dispossession, social and physical displacement, and migrations that have been inherent to the formation of capitalism since the fifteenth century, including colonialism, slavery, and the formation of the modern nation state; as well as concepts and ideologies of race, racism, nation, migrant, and non-migrant that unfolded in the context of industrial capitalism, the growth of the industrial city, and the mobility and dispossession of labor and colonial migrants during the time early urban and migration research emerged. It is “during this conjuncture of imperial competition, industrial expansion, and labor mobility of the 19th and early 20th century” that “the scientific study of geography and migration became popular” (Glick Schiller, 2021, 9). At the same time, this work also set the stage for academically normalizing and reproducing constructions of race and migrant, and the nation state, its borders, and citizenship, leading to international migration (including displacement-induced migration) and the concentration of migrants in cities (often as a result of displacement) being treated as anomalous and a problem for both the national (in migration studies) and the urban community (in urban studies). Specifically, since the middle of the twentieth century, the “golden age of capitalism,” and in relation to post-WWII reconfigurations of nation states and postcolonial state-building processes around the globe, studies on displacement have been framed with reference to national and urban containers, seeing international displacement and forced migration as a side-effect of conflict and territorial disputes inherent to state-building processes, and urban displacement as a result of class struggle and class-based processes of neighborhood change in cities (despite the people who were affected often belonging to racialized, colonial, and migrant population groups, as Ruth Glass (1960, 1961) discussed in her classic work).
While “historically, it was colonialism and slavery that introduced the large-scale displacement of labor forces around the globe,” today “in the contemporary global order of free market capitalism complex movements of people across territories, some through voluntary relocation, others through systematic displacement, have continued” (Miraftab, 2014, 37). Considering the increase of conflicts over territory and resources, as well as the consequences of climate change related to capitalist production, these processes have grown in recent years, resulting in an unprecedented 125 million individuals currently displaced globally and around 150 million unhoused individuals. This represents an “expanding and overlapping reality in the era of intensified global displacements” (Huq and Miraftab, 2020, 351). Consequently, we would argue that urban and migration studies need to move closer together (again) to make sense of C21st displacements. To that end, in the following sections we draw out the core characteristics and concepts from both migration and urban studies in order to bridge their disciplinary understandings of displacement.
Coerced mobility and varied displacements in (forced) migration studies
The development of forced migration and refugee studies since the 1980s has been a specific response to understanding international displacement and the growing arrival of refugees from the south to the north (Chimni, 2009). For a long time, they have been concerned with the relationship of refugees to international protection regimes and nation states, being commonly seen as an exception to the norm—an anomaly that does not fit into the people-state-territory trinity of the modern state system and thus needs solutions. The development of a global refugee regime (including international institutional structures in the form of the UNHCR, humanitarianism, and aid programs) driven by powerful Western states has aimed both at placing people in a definable category to give them certain rights, and at protecting states’ own interests and sovereignty (Chimni, 1993; Freilick, 1992; Goldenziel, 2016). Often adhering to these structures and developments, (forced) migration and refugee studies have been accused of being characterized by a nation-state-centric focus, framing the state as a monolithic and dispassionate institution that primarily functions to construct, define, and regulate displacement, migration and migrants (Haddad, 2002). Within this “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002), the state serves as the sole unit of analysis for the study of social processes, taking the role of the state or the lives and subjectivities of migrants and displaced populations as starting points (see Hyndman, 2000). These normative approaches “strongly suggest an organismic, functionalist view of society that constructs displacement as an anomaly in the life of an otherwise ‘whole’, stable, sedentary society” (Malkki, 1995, 508).
As a result, displacement in (forced) migration studies has often been conceptualized in reference to the nation state and to: (1) where displacement takes place and to what extent it includes the crossing of state and international borders (“asylum seekers,” “refugees” or “international migrants”) or displacement within a country of origin (“internally displaced persons” or “internal migrants”); (2) why it takes place and what the “root causes” for displacement are; and (3) the “duration,” and phases in which displacement occurs (emergency, protracted displacement, resettlement, return) (Bond, 2022; Koser and Martin, 2011; Naidoo et al., 2018). These categorizations of displacement processes and the displaced by geography, cause, and time are highly significant in shaping perceptions of social worth and notions of threat (Hyndman and Giles, 2011), and thus have relevant implications for survival and access to legal protection, humanitarian assistance, and governance responses from the international community (Collyer, 2011), as they in part represent administrative categories through which mobility and rights are governed (McNevin, 2013). However, they fall short of capturing the often overlapping realities of displacement and those displaced, and may disguise the real causes, processes, and timescapes related to displacement. As Bakewell (2011, 18) states, “many of the conflicts which drive the movement of refugees and IDPs are intimately connected with the same global capital interests that are also driving labour migration around the world.”
Over the past 20 years, scholarship on the “migration-displacement nexus” and the “asylum-migration nexus” has increasingly exemplified the dilemmas related to differentiating migration movements, spaces, and groups, in relation to increasingly mixed and multiple motivations, “mixed flows” of migrants and displaced populations, and different extents of coercion and voluntary decisions to migrate, as well as to the ways they change status or category, fit into multiple categories, or where different migrant types adopt similar survival strategies or coping mechanisms (Koser and Martin, 2011). This research reveals the different ways in which the political and economic motivations for migration are interrelated and difficult to disentangle (Bond, 2022), because “political upheavals, conflicts and economic difficulties often occur simultaneously giving people multiple motivations for the decision to move” (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018, 53). Consequently, migration scholars have started to acknowledge that there are limits to binary contrasts, for example, between “genuine” refugees and “economic” migrants (Bond, 2022), and thus the need to see a continuum “wherein compulsion plays a greater role in some migration flows and a lesser role in others” (Bartram et al., 2014, 69) and where migration in general falls “somewhere in the blurry middle of the forced-voluntary spectrum” (Erdal and Oeppen, 2018, 981). This recognition is furthered by the substantial body of development-induced displacement and resettlement scholarship which primarily focuses on internal displacement, broadening the scope of migration studies by foregrounding forms of displacement that are not captured by refugee law or conventional migration categories. Scholars including Penz and colleagues (2011), Terminski (2014) and Satiroglu and Choi (2015) reveal the multiplicity of intersecting displacement drivers that produce displacement, varying forms of restructuring social relations, disruptions of cultural, social, and economic attachments to land and place, and different degrees of impoverishment.
Yet “conceptualizations of displacement have been surprisingly elusive in the past three decades” (Ali, 2023, 1083). Part of the problem is that notions and concepts of “migration,” “forced migration,” and “displacement” are used in different senses and at different times (Bakewell, 2011). In some debates on international migration, displacement is conceptualized as “a sub-set of migration processes,” distinct as a process regarding certain dimensions such as agency, rationales for, timescale, and extent of migration; and as a condition regarding a particular and often ongoing “state of being” displaced (Bakewell, 2011, 21). Consequently, displacement “describes people who have been forced against their will to abandon their homes and familiar surroundings and lose their source of livelihood as a result of external events over which they have insufficient control”, whereas “the term ‘forced migration’ tends to be used to describe different types of displacement, population movement, resettlement, migration and individual journeys and also, increasingly, diasporas” (McDowell and Morrell, 2010, 4f.). Other scholars contend that such conceptualizations center on events and thus conceal processes that occur before movement begins, as well as neglecting the simultaneity of both coercion and agency as part of displacement (Zetter, 2018). With regards to the first, Ali (2023, 1083) differentiates between displacement as a process and forced migration as a condition, arguing that “displacement is a process that begins before people are forced to leave their places of residence and it can consist of an array of different pressures and constraints” whereas forced migration is an event and an outcome of displacement. Regarding the second, different bodies of work highlight agents and agencies in displacement, for example, when considering people’s home-making practices under conditions of displacement (Beeckmans et al., 2022; Pasquetti and Sanyal, 2020). In addition, scholars on internal and development-induced displacement demonstrate that displacement cannot be captured by narrow definitions focused solely on mobility or loss of residence; rather, it is an extended process of dispossession, reconfiguration of social worlds, and confrontation with power and development logics which also provokes grassroots critique and resistance to development paradigms (Oliver-Smith 2006, 2010; Satiroglu and Choi 2015; Terminski 2014).
Urban renewal, gentrification, and displacement in urban studies
As indicated earlier, displacement has from early on been at the center of attention in urban studies, specifically in research on slum clearance processes in the 20th century and “new urban renewal” as a process of gentrification in the 21st century. Even though displacement is caused by several factors (see Baeten et al., 2020; Watt and Morris, 2024), contemporary urban research on gentrification has provided an analytical re-emphasis on displacement in the Global North and the Global South. Scholars have drawn heavily on the post-war literature on urban renewal, with Hyra (2006) conceptualizing “new urban renewal” in the late 20th/early 21st century as state-led gentrification in the Global North; and others identifying “slum-gentrification” in the Global South, and also the Global North (see Lees, 2014, 2016; Lees et al., 2015). Despite the fact that Ruth Glass (1960, xviii–xix) identified gentrification-induced displacement, describing how working-class neighborhoods in London “have been invaded by the middle-classes—upper and lower […] until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed,” “displacement” was for some time under-studied and under-conceptualized in comparison to “gentrification.” Classic gentrification research focused on gentrifiers at the expense of displacees (Slater et al., 2004) and conceptualized working-class displacement as an integral component of gentrification (Marcuse, 1985; Smith, 2006). Displacement was vaguely defined as “what happens when forces outside the household make living there impossible, hazardous, or unaffordable” (Hartman et al., 1982, 3 in Slater, 2012, 173), suggesting that displacement refers more to an event than a process, and without further specifying the “forces” that cause displacement. Marcuse (1985), however, conceptualized displacement in some detail, as being a result of abandonment, which occurs due to public or private disinvestment in particular neighborhoods, and gentrification as the spatially concentrated processes of investment and population change, both of which are, according to Smith (1982, 139), linked to “larger processes of uneven development […] rooted in the structure of the capitalist mode of production.” Marcuse emphasized several forms of displacement, such as “direct (last resident and last chain) displacement,” “exclusionary displacement,” and “displacement pressure” to render “the full impact of displacement” that are a result of and cause “economic changes, physical changes, neighbourhood changes, and individual unit changes” (Marcuse, 1985, 208). But in gentrification studies there was little attention to his analysis for many years causing Slater (2006) to lament the “Missing Marcuse.”
“Capitalism-neoliberal-centered” urban scholarship (Yiftachel, 2020, 156) in the round has explained displacement in relation to the capitalist logic of accumulation, dispossession, and inequality; including relentless processes of capital investment, speculation, and redevelopment that produce cycles of eviction and expulsion (Harvey, 2006; Lees, 2016; Sassen, 2014; Smith, 2002). Most prominently, Harvey’s (2003, 2007, 2010) idea of “accumulation by dispossession” (based on Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation”) has become a beacon for theorizing displacement processes in the urban realm and beyond. Displacement, dispossession, and expropriation are here seen as the condition of, and continued processes related to, accumulation; including what Harvey (2003) describes as the forced acquisition of land and resources from people, and their expulsion, as well the transformation of contemporary political, social, and economic systems away from public interests into the pursuit of extracting profit (Harvey, 2003). In short, urbanization under capitalism is built around extraction, explusion, and creative destruction, where the new is predicated on the destruction of the old (Astolfo, 2023).
Adopting “accumulation by dispossession” as a theoretical framework for urban research and urbanization-related displacement has given rise to much broader analyses of urban restructuring processes (see Brenner et al., 2009; Künkel and Mayer, 2011), including a shift in scale from the neighborhood to the “world scale,” and to planetary processes of accumulation by dispossession that produce violent coercion and a range of physical and social displacements on multiple scales (Lees et al., 2023). Thus, displacement “refers to the city-, state-, and empire-building processes that have stripped people of land, resources, and their means of livelihood and forced them to reposition, reorder, or relocate their lives and relationships,” as well as lose access to the social means of subsistence (Çağlar and Glick Schiller, 2018, 19). Because “dispossessive processes are […] linked to broader struggles for land and resources within geopolitical contentions, which cause people to flee their homelands” (Çağlar and Glick Schiller, 2018, 19), conceptualizations of accumulation by dispossession, “displacement by dispossession” (Araghi, 2009) or “accumulative dispossession” (Lees and White, 2020) are useful to theorize and investigate the intersections of various displacement processes.
In the past two decades, scholars have identified several shortcomings in urban research related to displacement, calling for “more multi-dimensional and temporally sensitive conceptualisations of gentrification displacement” (Phillips et al., 2021, 66). Research on urban displacement has addressed some of these issues. First, by including large-scale “mega displacements” and “gentrification by mass eviction” (Brickell et al., 2017; Desmond, 2012; Lees et al., 2015, 2016) caused by state-led megaprojects which “are often related, but cannot be reduced to subsets of global capitalism or gentrification” (Yiftachel, 2020, 153). Moreover, nation-building efforts which are often entangled with racism, are at the center of the removal of communities in the Global South (Astolfo, 2023). Second and related, research has furthered the understanding of timescapes and the temporal dimensions of displacement by dispossession, for example, by advancing Marcuse’s “displacement pressure” and highlighting “life on hold” (Pull et al., 2020), “displacement anxiety” (Watt, 2018), and “displaceability” (Yiftachel, 2020). Third, the condition of displaceability has also enabled us to move conceptualizations of displacement to those affected, including their experiences, emotions, and practices of survival. Elliott-Cooper et al. (2020, 492), for example, explain displacement “as a process of un-homing” that “always ruptures the connection between people and place.” Similarly, Davidson (2009) argues that displacement must be understood as a violation of the enactment and production of space; the right to (make) place and the right to dwell. Porteous and Smith’s (2001, 12) conceptualization of “domicide”—“the deliberate destruction of home by human agency in the pursuit of specific goals, which causes suffering to the victims”—also focuses on notions of “un-homing” and “loss and change,” emphasizing the physical experiences and emotional suffering related to displacement and losing homes. This body of work puts emphasis on organized, spatial, and experienced violence as starting points to conceptualize displacement: the lived experiences of displacement in relation to disruption of “valued ways of living and functioning” (Ali, 2023, 1083), the (continued) destruction of attachments to place and home (Davidson, 2009; Meth et al., 2023), but also the “survivability” of the displaced (Lees and Robinson, 2021). Lastly, focusing on and theorizing from the displaced expands understandings of urban displacement in relation to accumulation by dispossession as class-based toward “a racialized process of (de)valorization and (dis)accumulation that relies upon legal and extra-legal racialized violence” (Loyd and Bonds, 2018, 2), therefore expanding understandings of gentrification-related displacement in relation to the racialization of spaces and the ways race defines urban and displacement processes (Rucks-Ahidiana, 2022; see also Golash-Boza, 2023). However, because displacement is also the product of, and invariably involves, changes in gender relations and the production of gender inequalities, displacement is equally also a gendered process and experience (Sakizlioglu, 2014). Indeed, important new work is unveiling urban dispossession through a feminist lens (see Sakizlioglu, 2024), showing how gentrification and displacement makes it difficult to pursue social reproduction.
Intersections between migration and urban studies research on displacement
Our investigation shows that there is a persistent conceptual divide between urban and migration studies fields regarding displacement. These differences are specifically visible in regards to scale (neighborhood/city vs nation state/border crossing), causes (structural/processual in urban vs event-centered in migration studies), actors (private actor/state focus in urban vs state focus in migration research), governance (neoliberal urban governance and austerity in urban research vs international and national migration regimes in migration research), and the displaced (class-focus in urban and national origin/ethnicity focus vs “ethnic lens” and “categorial fetishes” in migration studies). These divisions between “international” and “urban” processes and experiences of displacement overshadow the fact that the people who are internationally displaced are often those most vulnerable to the repeated loss of housing and home in cities. Another problem is that both migration and urban research have studied internationally displaced and asylum-seeking populations “as though they have no relation to the racial and class structures of the societies in which they reside” (Rajaram, 2018, 627). Instead of productively focusing on “the common marginalisations of subaltern and racialized groups before capitalism” (Rajaram, 2018, 627) and the connections between internationally displaced and marginalized urban populations (Sanyal, 2012), in most research they have been studied as an exception to the norm, in isolation, and “outside” of cities and nation states, and their political, economic, and social fabrics (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016).
There are, nevertheless, some similarities regarding the conceptualization of displacement as a process, an experience, or a state/condition of violent disruption from home that is often related to multiple social, political, economic, cultural, ethnical, natural, and environmental causes. In turn, these—to different degrees—are related to broader processes of accumulation by dispossession and capitalist modes of production. Specifically, we want to highlight four interlinked key accounts and concepts through which we can bring together understandings developed in migration and urban studies, to work towards an analytical framework through which we can comprehend displacement more holistically. Our approach here draws on, but departs from, Hirsh et al. (2020) and Watt and Morris (2024) who focus exclusively on urban displacement. Following an explorative and interpretative approach, the accounts developed below engage with the possibilities of seeing urban and international displacements in closer interaction with each other, but they are by no means exhaustive.
Displacement by dispossession
In both urban and migration studies, there is an understanding that displacement is linked to micro-events as well as to broader, global and historically embedded processes of large-scale forced migration, dispossession, exploitation, and expropriation at the center of (post)colonialism, nation-state building, and capitalist development. This includes the production of the “myth of difference” between displaced populations in the Global South and North, as a result of the construction of race, nation, and migrant (Chimni, 2000; Glick Schiller, 2021). Connecting displacement to the “disconnection, disjunction, and friction,” as well as the “stoppages and decelerations,” through which globalization and urbanization take place (Miraftab, 2014, 40), capitalist accumulation and dispossession are at the center of the production of displacement and the displaced in manifold ways. The forces of capitalist accumulation and dispossession “are acute in conflicts and wars, giving rise to violent expulsions that forcibly displace populations” and they “can also be chronic in nature, as evident in the neoliberal restructuring of societies that entails the erosion of social rights” (Philipson Isaac, 2024, 5, original emphasis). Thus, they are linked and evident in different processes, geographies, scales, and forms of displacement and they are, as scholars in both migration and urban studies increasingly argue (see Bird and Schmid, 2023; Dantzler, 2020), related to the creation of racial distinctions to enable displacement by dispossession (often through state violence, coercion, stigmatization, and marginalization, through the dichotomies of “legal” and “illegal” migrant and citizen). Because “displacement has the effect of reinforcing the surplus status” of displaced groups (Gillespie et al., 2021, 1714), we can also see displacement as a means to the (continued) production of racialized “relative surplus populations”—a concept helpful for further bringing together migration and urban research, because it “points to commonalities between groups of people and allows us to break through the fetishising and ahistorical concept of migrants” (Rajaram, 2018, 632). Therefore, dispossession as an “authoritative and often paternalistic apparatus of controlling and appropriating the spatiality, mobility, affectivity, potentiality, and relationality of (neo)colonized subjects” (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013, 11), including migrants and racialized (and classed) people displaced internationally and in urban environments, connects research in urban and migration studies interested in the broader underlying processes and structures of displacement.
Displacement powers and forces
Related to “the forces of capitalist accumulation and dispossession,” displacement is a product of capitalist state power, and the power relations and imbalances linked to it. At its very core, displacement “is principally a conflict between the powerful and the powerless” (McDowell and Morrell, 2010, 3f.), occurring because of “negotiations over the exertion of power and control of physical space and its concomitant sense of place” (Pull et al., 2020, 331). Both urban and migration studies highlight that displacement results from “spatial power [that] is exerted by policy, legalities and violence” (Yiftachel, 2020, 161), encompassing different power relations and negotiations between local, national, and international forces, and the displaced (Hirsh et al., 2020) and thus involving a variety of power dynamics.
Power takes place on, and can be conceptualized in relation to, different scales. To explain broader, macro dynamics and exercises of power, migration scholars in particular have drawn on Foucault’s (1978) idea of biopower. Agamben’s (1998) work—frequently cited in migration research and camp studies (see Jenkins, 2004; Minca, 2005; Turner, 2016)—for example, has further developed biopower to conceptualize camps for displaced populations as the practice and space of sovereign power to reduce migrants to “bare life.” Mbembe (2019) has developed the concept of necropolitics to expand biopolitical understandings of power to the ways in which racism is a prime driver for the systematic subjugation of life to the power of death, precarious life conditions, dispossession, and displacement. McIntyre and Nast’s (2011) work on necropolis and biopolis bridge the concepts of bio- and necropower and enroll them to the urban: the necropolis refers to the “impoverished and invisible spaces of negation and social death” produced by the “dispossession and hyper-exploitation” of racialized surplus labor populations, often originating from Global South nations; whereas the biopolis refers to spaces that are governed and designed to “foster and conserve sovereign life,” often flourishing in the wealthier nations which extract massive “latent and floating labor forces” from the racialized surplus populations of the South (McIntyre and Nast, 2011, 1467). This relationship between necropolis and biopolis forms a spatial dialectical unity embedded in the racialization of migration and racial capitalism: the biopolis draws its life force from the necropolis as “necropolitan migrants” who are dislocated and streamed into the biopolis to fill peripheral labor shortages, thereby making “the biopolis a site of accumulation through dispossession” (McIntyre and Nast, 2011, 1481)—the so-called bio(necro)polis. In turn, the necro(bio)polis describes the annexation of the biopolis to the necropolis through the flow of biopolitical capital into the necropolis, sustaining the lives of “racialized others,” ensuring the supply and survival of surplus populations barely enough to keep them as a pool of labor.
While including these understandings of power into displacement research supports the conceptualization of power as an organizing principle to control racialized surplus populations for the capitalist mode of production, specific case studies and urban research reveal the realization (and contestation) of bio- and necropower. Scholars including Ali (2023) and Hirsh and colleagues (2020) specifically focus on the relationship between “coercers” and coercive structures on the one hand (such as institutions like the police, the military, or the state) and “coercees” on the other, explaining that there are particular “coercion-control tensions” that result from “the legislation, deployment of enforcement forces, and planning decision-making processes demonstrated by the state […], and the practices of negotiation, resistance, or acceptance shown by the displaced” (Hirsh et al., 2020, 396). Therefore, displacement is a product of capitalist state power but it does not go uncontested: with regards to gentrification and urban displacements, scholars emphasize manifold practices and forms of resistance, including the development of housing and resident organizations, squatting and occupation, riots, protests and demonstrations, legal actions, and seeking cooperation with municipal actors (Brickell, 2014; Hubbard and Lees, 2018; Lancione, 2017; Slater, 2006; Smith, 2002). Some of these are conceptualized by applying Lefebvre’s “right to the city” and embedded in housing struggles and social movements in the context of, and against, the neoliberal city (Harvey, 2017; Kuymulu, 2013; Mayer, 2012; Rolnick, 2014; Uitermark et al., 2012). Urban scholarship in the Global South contributes to these debates by focusing on resistance against slum clearances, mega projects, land dispossession, state-led development projects, and mass evictions, with resistance spanning from neighborhoods to national political contexts and in some cases to the global scale (Brickell et al., 2017; González, 2016; Hussain, 2008; Islam and Sakızlıoğlu, 2015; Levien, 2013; Rodríguez and Di Virgilio, 2023; Shmaryahu-Yeshurun, 2022). In the (forced) migration literature, studies concerned with the agency of internationally displaced and asylum-seeking migrants reveal that even though states aim to manage and govern migration to deploy power over migrants, while putting them in precarious subjectivities and spaces, these positions and spatial productions can also be starting points for “the weak [to] create their own places within those places; making them temporarily their own as they occupy and move through them” (Jewkes, 2013, 128) and turn them into “highly politicised spaces,” which become “sites of resistance, commemoration and new political struggle” (Martin et al., 2020, 754).
The growing body of literature on sanctuary and solidarity cities brings urban and migration research together and reflects how migrant exclusion, disfranchisement, and expulsion enacted through capitalist state power is contested and negotiated in, and through, cities, while simultaneously being connected to global struggles for migrant rights, housing rights and the right to the city (see e.g., Bauder, 2017; Kreichauf and Mayer, 2021; Manfredi-Sánchez, 2020), fostering “a new collective subjectivity that brings together individualized local and immigrant inhabitants sharing a need for a roof” (Caciagli, 2021, 249). These connections not only reposition “the immigrant and the citizen as urban subjects, rather than essentially different subjects” (Sassen, 2013, 69), producing “a new kind of political identity through the struggle itself” (Hamann and Türkmen, 2020, 515), but also enable urban and migration research to see resistance against displacement as a larger project of housing, labor, anti-capitalist struggles, and global urban justice. Because “the concept of resistance itself can be highly relative and context-dependent, and there is an urgent need to unpack it further” (Lees et al., 2018, 349), it is important for urban and migration scholarship to come together to further examine it.
Displacement as permanent temporariness
Building on Ramsay’s (2020) work, Philipson Isaac (2024, 5) expands the notion of dispossession, focusing on “how dispossession operates in and through the border regime and, more specifically, through time.” Including temporal dimensions of dispossession in debates about displacement helps conceptualize displacement as a condition and temporal regime, rather than a process or policy act through which the displaced are governed in relation to accumulation and the production of surplus value and bodies (Astolfo, 2023). Yiftachel’s (2020) notion of displaceability, developed in relation to urban processes of displacement, captures these dimensions, underlining that displacement represents a “systemic condition” that holds “large parts of urban society in suspense, often living on borrowed time in conditions of growing vulnerability and uncertainty” (Yiftachel, 2020, 161, our emphasis. See also Atkinson, 2015; Lees and Robinson, 2021; Pull and Richard, 2021; Valli, 2015). Therefore, displacement is not only limited to out-migration, dislocation, or relocation—“a snap-shot process of moving from point a to point b” (Pull and Richard, 2021, 549)—but includes “people who have never moved but have nonetheless been socially dispossessed, and displaced,” as well as those continuously threatened by the possibility of being displaced (Çağlar and Glick Schiller, 2018, 19f.). This “sense of displacement” (Valli, 2015) describes the condition of displacement that occurs even in the absence of physical movement.
Linking migration and urban studies, van Baar (2017, 214) proposes the notion of “evictability” to refer to the “possibility of being removed from a sheltering place,” providing an analytical approach to examine the continuities between experiences and practices of displacement at different scales and to reveal the connections between deportation—and the state of “deportability” (De Genova, 2002)—bordering processes, racialization, policing, and expulsion from urban and nation state spaces. The study of displacement as a condition and in relation to temporal dispossession “introduces consideration of time into the heart of spatial policies and development” (Elliott-Cooper et al., 2020, 502), as well as linking it to historical roots, current possession and legalities, and future plans for urban continuities or ruptures and their impacts on life chances (Golash-Boza, 2023; Yiftachel, 2020). Moreover, it enables deeper attention to questions of mobility and immobility and to the experiences of those targeted and threatened by displacement conditions and their related vulnerabilization in that they cannot (afford to) move—issues still undertheorized in displacement research.
The spatialities of displacement
Displacement is a spatial condition, process, and experience. It destroys but also produces spatialities that emerge in response to the displaced and by the displaced themselves as part of displacement processes. It includes humanitarian or state spaces to spatially order mobility and migrations—such as camps, detention centers, accommodation facilities and homeless shelters—or self-settled spaces, squats, informal settlements and their variations created in, and across, urban spaces and en route (Fawaz, 2016; Ikizoglu Erensu and Kaşli, 2016; Malkki, 1995). In regard to spatial productions related to displacement, urban theory and migration studies have been intersecting for some time, particularly in the fields of camp and homelessness studies. This emcompasses the integration of camps in “border spectacles” (De Genova, 2013), including the rescaling, diversification, and internalization of borders and border-making practices in cities (Lebuhn, 2013), and the formation of urban borderscapes (Bastide, 2014); as well as homeless shelters to govern both the urban and internationally displaced (Kreichauf, 2023; Sahlin, 2020). Scholars draw direct connections between camp space and urban space, city development, urban economies, livelihood, or community building, highlighting the quasi-urban nature of camp environments as well as the somewhat organic urbanization of camps, whereby they can become a part of, or potential, cities and gain permanence and prominence for a diversity of urban dwellers (Fawaz, 2016; Katz et al., 2018). Referring to cases in the Global South, scholars illustrate “that the lived experiences of growing informal settlement dwellers and refugee or refugee-like populations—an expanding and overlapping global reality—seem to be more intertwined than separate” because “informal settlement dwellers are, like camp dwellers, often displaced multiple times across and within national borders” (Huq and Miraftab, 2020, 352. See also e.g., Sanyal, 2014; Pasquetti and Picker, 2017; Shalabi and Pugalis, 2019). Similarly, scholars referring to cases in the Global North explain that camps, as much as self-settled spaces, squats, and informal settlements, are part of wider urban processes and entangled with city-making, governance, and planning (Casati, 2018; Nettelbladt and Boano, 2019; Porter et al., 2019).
Consequently, spaces of displacement can be understood as spaces of urban marginality, 1 where internationally displaced migrants are included among a city’s “subaltern subjects,” having similar needs and desires and competing with other urban dwellers for housing, jobs, and services on precarious levels (Sanyal, 2014; Thieme et al., 2017). In this case, spaces of displacement are not exceptions to the “normal city” but are part of it, as part of “campization” processes (Kreichauf, 2018) in particular and alternate ways, as variants of spatial formations (Sanyal, 2014; Shalabi and Pugalis, 2019). Analytically, this enables internationally displaced migrants and their spatial formations to be juxtaposed with other urban populations that experience or are configured in similar formations, as well as underlining their appropriation and invention of, and contribution to, the production and transformation of urban spaces for political, social, and economic participation (Grabska, 2006; Huq and Miraftab, 2020). In this regard, Yiftachel’s (2009) concept of “gray spaces” is useful for both urban and migration research to explain “developments, enclaves, populations and transactions positioned between the ‘lightness’ of legality/approval/safety and the ‘darkness’ of eviction/destruction/death” (p. 250) and to allow scholars “to think of a different kind of urban politics to emerge from spaces and practices that seeks to silence and strip subjects of political voice” (Sanyal, 2014, 569).
When international and urban displacement meet: “Multiplied displacement”
Considering that the majority of people displaced—internally and internationally—migrate to urban areas and cities where they are confronted with, and become part of, urban displacement processes and experiences, the processes of displacement identified in migration studies are entangled with those explained in urban studies. As a result, displaced migrants in cities “bring together” and “unite” several displacements. This makes studying their movements, trajectories, experiences, and the urban geographies and spatialities they traverse or become ensnared in, as well as the techniques through which they are governed, a pertinent starting point in theorizing the intersections and similarities of these displacements, as well as conceptualizations of displacement advanced in urban and migration research. In the following sections, we develop the concept of “multiplied displacement” by applying some of the ideas laid out above using the example of internationally displaced migrants in urban areas. Then, we provide some empirically informed examples to further the understanding of “multiplied displacement.”
Making sense of multiplied displacement
Displacement does not end when internationally displaced people reach their places of “arrival”, or even when they receive protection status. Instead, “many refugees and migrants in Europe [and elsewhere] today not only have to leave their home behind, but cope with the perduring issue of finding, making, and then losing a home” (Belloni and Massa, 2022, 929). A growing body of work conceptualizes these ongoing displacements (Belloni and Massa, 2022; Bhagat, 2024; El Moussawi, 2023; Huq and Miraftab, 2020; Ramsay, 2020). Most prominently, they are researched within scholarship on “protracted displacement,” describing displacement situations that do not dissolve but deepen over time and thus represent “a long-lasting condition of economic precarity, marginalisation, rightlessness and future uncertainty, which displaced persons experience after their initial displacement, and which is coupled with consistently and systematically blocked options for both social and spatial mobility” (Etzold and Fechter, 2022, 4296. See also Adelman, 2016; Brun, 2021; Zetter, 2011; Hyndman and Giles, 2018). However, most of this work, although strongly time sensitive, is not space sensitive, seldom addresses the unfolding of continued displacement in relation to cities, and does not always engage with the continued displacement of asylum-seeking people once they receive protection status and “have rights.” We are more concerned with how the continued displacement of internationally displaced migrants unfolds against the backdrop of urban processes of displacement, where people displaced across national borders continue to be displaced across urban ones.
We refer to these situations, processes, and conditions as “multiplied displacement.” This term describes the multiplication of the—intersecting and mutually reinforcing—forms, processes, experiences, and factors relevant to the production of displacement against the backdrop of international forced migration movements, urban processes of marginalization, exclusion, and unhousing in “cities of arrival”, and the continued reproduction of accumulation by dispossession. It points to three interrelated aspects. First, it illustrates that internationally displaced migrants experience a material and emotional sense of “repeated loss and lack of home” (Belloni and Massa, 2022, 929), which continues to “rupture [ ] the connection between people and place” (Elliott-Cooper et al., 2020, 492). In the urban realm, these displacement experiences perpetuate and proliferate exponentially: one displacement (experience/process) is the basis for and may heighten the risk for (further) displacement to occur. Second, it explains that international and urban processes of displacement overlap in the urban realm: internationally displaced migrants not only face urban forms and processes of displacement (such as homelessness, evictions, informal settlements, and precarious housing in shelters) but they often share space with, and are increasingly governed in relation to, internally displaced people and those that fall off competitive housing markets in diverse spaces of displacement (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016; Sahlin, 2020; Soederberg, 2021). And third, it demonstrates that the repeated ruptures produced by multiplied displacement facilitate the uninterrupted process of accumulation of capital by racialized dispossession and exploitation.
Turning (back) to Marxian understandings of displacement and conceptualizations of capitalist state power, multiplied displacement is produced in relation to “the key dynamics of capitalism—accumulation/dispossession, credit/debt, production/surplus, capitalist/worker, developed/underdeveloped, contract/coercion, and others” which become—specifically in relation to internationally displaced migrants—“articulated through race” (Leroy and Jenkins, 2021, 3) and through gender (see Bhattacharya, 2017). That means multiplied displacement takes place within the logics of capital and the continued dispossession of the internationally displaced across and in relation to various spatial scales. In other words: multiplied displacement continuously recreates the conditions for the production of surplus value through the exploitable and expropriateable, as well as surplus populations on multiple spatial scales (global, international, regional, and urban) through accumulation by dispossession. Regarding the first, surplus value is produced through the displacement by dispossession of homes, privatization of land, housing, and appropriation of assets and resources that takes place, for example, in relation to war, law and policies, re/development projects, and gentrification processes. With regard to the second, displaced people are either commodified in terms of their labor power and integrated into capitalist systems of exploitation, expropriation, and reproduction (Fraser, 2016), or they are made surplus to capitalist accumulation, framed as socially undesirable, and unabsorbed by capital but in profitable ways of fixing, warehousing, and containment related to exploitation, expropriation, and reproduction—often interchangeably and sporadically (Bhagat, 2022; Kreichauf, 2023). To put it in simple terms: internationally displaced migrants are dispossessed and displaced by the same forces of capitalist production that produce their “original,” as well as continued, displacement; both relate to capitalist value-making processes and the displaced migrants’ position in the political and economic structures of contemporary racialized (and gendered 2 ) capitalism in which they used to reside (home and home region) and come to reside (places of “arrival”, “new” home), and are displaced or threatened to be displaced from (Rajaram, 2018). In these processes and conditions, “the construction of cultural, religious, or racialized difference, or the judgment that such people are ‘deplorable’ or criminal elements who lack the necessary values or work ethic, may serve to justify displacement” (Çaglar and Glick Schiller, 2018, 20) and play a crucial role regarding their framing and “management” as an exploitable, expropriateable, and/or relative surplus population.
Spatially, multiplied displacement produces alternating and contemporaneous conditions and phases of immobility and mobility, fixing, and (re)moving, that unfold against the backdrop of the uneven capitalist development of space as a resource system to generate value and surplus value (Harvey, 2001). This resource system “entails a racial (fix)ation as the continuation of accumulation,” treating certain people and places as “obsolete, in need of appropriation, removal and erasure” (Bledsoe et al., 2022, 16). Internationally displaced migrants become entangled in this system and spatial processes “of (de)valorization and (dis)accumulation” that rely on “legal and extra-legal racialized violence” (Loyd and Bonds, 2018, 2), in ways that they become either fixed in and/or removed from different spaces. With regards to the first, they are distributed to and fixed in spaces and areas deemed suitable for racialized and displaced populations, while access to other areas and spaces is limited. This includes an array of bordering, channeling and containment practices, such as camps, homeless shelters, detention centers, “the ghetto”, and other spaces of urban marginality; used to regulate the uneven effects of capitalist development by producing spatialities of surplus populations, reproduction, race, and precarity (Nast, 2011). In cities, these practices unfold against the backdrop of the production of value in housing and real estate markets (Fields and Raymond, 2021), where bodies “constructed as ‘other’ (or performing outside normative expectations of neoliberalism)” are denied “access to housing, property, and social spaces of privilege” (Fluri et al., 2022, 241). This keeps them fixed in precarious spaces of shelter and housing. Regarding the latter, displaced populations are continuously kept on the move and “mobile” in coercive and forced ways, as part of practices of control, filtering, circulation, and management to divide, discipline, and oppress displaced populations. Consequently, multiplied displacement occurs in relation to these phases and spaces of immobility and mobility, fixing and (re)moving in the context of the placement in and eviction from sheltering and informal spaces; as well as regarding residential segregation, housing discrimination, and unequal housing opportunities—which continue and multiply the displacement experiences, processes, and conditions of internationally displaced migrants in urban settings.
Multiplied displacement encompasses continued experiences of disruptions and the loss of home, and therefore operates in and through time. In reference to the aforementioned concepts of “displaceability” (Yiftachel, 2020) and “evictability” (van Baar, 2017), multiplied displacement indicates that displacement situations may persist and intensify over time, materially and emotionally, and embody an expanded state of precarity and marginalization that extends beyond the initial displacement experience, is reinforced by it, and is characterized by continued constraints on both social and spatial mobility that are amplified in cities. It reflects that international displacements become interwoven with urban ones. In this regard, Ramsay (2020, 385) speaks of “temporal dispossession” to refer to the “temporal rhythms of displacement, and how these manifest broadly as the effects of global capitalism and neoliberal restructurings.” Consequently, multiplied displacement results in the imperiling of displaced peoples’ ability to navigate aspirational futures. This not only relates to material and emotional loss and disruption, the dispossession of home, resources, social (and economic) capital, and opportunities, but also to the dispossession of time that turns displacement into a “temporal state of liminality” (Ramsay, 2020, 389). In this sense, multiplied displacement captures the accumulation of loss, coerced movements, (im)mobilites, precariousness, and the continued control and appropriation of displaced bodies and the spaces they occupy, as well as their access to a future without displacement. Thus, it continues to establish a “sense of displacement” even if physical relocation may cease to occur (El Moussawi, 2023; Valli, 2015). Multiplied displacement describes and gives meaning to a number of trends and continued, reoccurring, and overlapping experiences, processes, and conditions of displacement that we explain in the following.
Prolonging, continuing, reoccurring, overlapping, accumulating: The workings of “multiplied displacement”
Multiplied displacement unfolds against the backdrop of four strongly interrelated trends, processes, and conditions that we have observed in our research and that of other scholars. First, migration and border regimes, including migration laws and legal-spatial technologies (camp housing, dispersal policies, etc.) and the de-territorialization of bordering processes (El-Kayed and Hamann, 2018; Kandylis, 2019) subject internationally displaced migrants to forms of “forced arrival” and “legal-spatial violence” (Kreichauf, 2021). On arrival, and as part of asylum procedures, they are placed in tight regimes of reception, dispersal, and camp accommodation that spatially order and govern their mobility, even beyond being given protection status (De Hoon et al., 2020; El Moussawi, 2023). Through dispersal, they become forced to move to localities they have not chosen (Tazzioli, 2020). In camps and accommodation, their movement and mobility are restricted through the spatial and temporal logics of these spaces and through regulatory barriers imposed by federal, state, and local levels of government. In addition, they are continuously confronted with the threat of being forced to leave their places of shelter (van Baar, 2017), including coerced movement and transferals within reception, dispersal, and accommodation regimes, eviction from shelter regimes into homelessness, and the erasure of and eviction from squats (Annunziata, 2020) and informal settlements, such as the “Calais Jungle” (Palmas, 2021). These regulations, processes, and conditions fragment, disrupt, and prolong the trajectories and mobility projects of internationally displaced migrants and contribute to the production of multiplied displacement.
Second, asylum-seeking migrants face “broken cities,” characterized by a “global housing crisis” (Potts, 2020). They are dramatically affected by the transformation of housing markets, including housing shortages and highly competitive, unaffordable, and exclusive housing provision. The diminishing availability of affordable, safe, secure, and habitable housing, together with growing foreclosures and rent arrears, has intensively culminated in the urban displacement that internationally displaced migrants have to navigate. Consequently, internationally displaced migrants face “an already burgeoning crisis of homelessness and affordable housing” (Bhagat, 2021, 635), while dealing “with the material ramifications of refugee management within disciplinary logics of market-oriented governance” (Bhagat, 2022, 956). In addition, internationally displaced migrants face discriminatory practices from landlords, housing companies, and real estate agents, limiting their housing options and access to housing (Weidinger and Kordel, 2023). Because there are historical dimensions that connect global cities and racialized forms of displacement (Danewid, 2020), migrants’ ongoing displacement is therefore determined in relation to their position within the racialized value regimes of housing and urban labor markets, including the wider history and processes of the racialized geographies of housing financialization and marginalization in cities (Gillespie et al., 2021). Their multiplied displacement does not take place in a void, but is as much related to their particular status, racial, gendered, social and class identities, and characteristics, as to the structures and workings of neoliberal cities and the socio-racial structures of exclusion in cities, which in turn are related to “racialized forms of displacement, dispossession and police violence” (Danewid, 2020, 289). They are connected to “broader neoliberal trends, alongside a general animosity towards refugees, culminating in an overt, or implied, ‘hostile environment’” (Brown et al., 2024, 227). As a consequence, as part of minoritized and racialized populations, internationally displaced migrants risk eviction and have limited locational options for housing. Struggling to find stable housing, they fail to transition from shelters into housing markets (El Moussawi, 2023) and are accordingly forced to remain in precarious shelter situations—from which they are frequently evicted—for longer periods; and they often experience homelessness (Kreichauf, 2023).
Third, and related, internationally displaced migrants in cities encounter other displaced populations, including the (often marginalized and racialized) urban displaced, as well as “migrants” and other people displaced internationally, who arrived previously or through other forms of migration, and with whom “they often physically share spaces […] in diverse spaces of asylum” (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016; see also Askins, 2015). This is because “contemporary forms of displacement are not limited to practices that are based on a rigid or crystal-clear distinction of border crossers along the (imagined) lines of the nation-state, state actors or political entities such as the EU and those of ‘(il-)legalized’ ‘migrants’ and ‘citizens’” (van Baar, 2017, 214), but biopolitical (and necropolitical) bordering and securitization processes, which unfold in urban areas, casting populations as deviant, criminal, violent, and in need of erasure. As such, multiplied displacement unfolds against the backdrop of overlapping displacements of racialized populations conflated through the logics and processes of racialized dispossession, violence, and governance in the bio(necro)polis (McIntyre and Nast, 2011): increasingly, internationally displaced migrants “are governed in ways similar to how other racialized and marginalised groups in precarious positions within capitalism are governed” (Rajaram, 2018, 627). This relationship between the governance of a “supposedly troublesome internal population, like homeless people or the Roma, and the same of an externalised population of migrants and refugees” (Rajaram, 2018, 627) becomes apparent in the production of “impoverished and invisible spaces of negation” (McIntyre and Nast, 2011) and through logics of segregation, containment, fixing, forced movement, and the racialization of poverty, marginalization, dispossession, hyper-exploitation; as well as in the restructuring of welfare policy. For example, in some European countries such as Germany and the UK, asylum-seeking migrants fall into the same punitive welfare system that regulates the ways they can (or cannot) translate their physical power into labor, including limits to the benefits and restrictions to mobility. They become integrated into the same regime of austerity, cost-efficiency, productivity, and privatization that underpins social policy and manifests their position as either exploitable subjects or relative surplus populations that need to be managed away through distinct punitive practices that reinforce and reproduce displacement (Darling, 2016). These mechanisms unfold spatially: internationally displaced migrants and racialized and marginalized urban residents (are forced to) occupy similar spaces and are governed through similar spatial logics. For example, asylum-seeking migrants in Berlin and New York City find themselves in the cities’ homeless shelters where they share space with and are governed in a similar way to the internal population marked as troublesome (Kreichauf, 2025). These conditions not only multiply internationally displaced migrants’ experiences of displacement and overlap with “other” displaced people (e.g., residents un-homed by the housing crisis) but they may also aggravate exclusion and suffering. In Sweden, Sahlin (2020, 27) describes how “subcategories of homeless people and newly arrived refugees seem to overlap, forming a specific category of non-entitled homeless refugee families, who are excluded from the target groups of settlement policies as well as homeless policies.”
Finally, the overlapping and intersecting processes, spatialities, modes of governance, and lived experiences of displacement across “different” populations have generated shared practices of resistance against the powers and forces of displacement enacted through policy, law, and violence. As outlined earlier, urban spaces worldwide have witnessed the emergence of joint protests that connect housing struggles and anti-eviction movements with migrant struggles. These often take the form of refugee housing protests, migrant squats, anti-eviction and anti-deportation mobilizations, and alliances between tenant unions, migrant justice groups, and both migrant and non-migrant populations facing eviction (Ataç et al., 2021; Caciagli, 2021; Hamann and Türkmen, 2020). Examining these shared struggles around multiplied displacement highlights what Hosseini and colleagues (2016, 667) describe as “the possibility of creating a common ground […] for progressive hybridization, and active political cooperation among diverse identities and ideological visions of contemporary global transformative movements, against existing capitalist social relations and structures of domination.” It also offers a basis for theorizing how joint and multiplied resistances against displacement contribute to constituting urban imaginaries (Tilley et al., 2017). Thinking through multiplied displacement therefore provides not only an analysis of intersecting structures of racial capitalism and racial capitalist state power—a critique of existing conditions—but also a horizon for imagining abolitionist and emancipatory urban futures.
Conclusion
In this paper, drawing on our own different but interrelated expertise, we have attempted to bring research on displacement from urban and migration studies into closer conversation with each other. We have illustrated that despite differences in the two fields regarding conceptualizing displacement forms, processes, and conditions, as well as the displaced, there are significant similarities around the concepts of accumulation by dispossession, power, temporality, space, and resistance that we can draw on. The idea of this paper is not to develop a single theory of displacement, but rather to demonstrate the real value in bringing these two fields together for future research on displacement. Indeed, with ongoing genocides and related urbicides and mass displacement in, for example, Palestine and Sudan, as well as with the escalating threat of climate-induced displacement into cities already expierencing a global housing crisis, this is perhaps more urgent now than ever before.
The concept of multiplied displacement highlights that the “mechanisms of disruption” displaced people continue to face “are heightened by the previous experiences of displacement and loss of home” (El Moussawi, 2023, 17). They are furthered in the urban realm and in existing struggles in urban housing markets; and thus embedded in the broader and continued processes and structures of global displacement. Specifically, the combination of the precarious legal status of the displaced (produced in response to international displacement and through violent migration governance), exclusionary and racialized urban migration and housing policies, austerity, and neoliberal housing markets, housing shortages, and unaffordability produce multiplied displacement and conditions and practices that perpetuate to displace the already (internationally) displaced. Thus, multiplied displacement comprises an extended form of “displaceability” (Yiftachel, 2020, 161)—one that not only “expands the understanding of displacement from a policy act to a systemic condition,” but in which displacements accumulate and thus the likelihood of displacement continues and produces a “temporal state of liminality” (Ramsay, 2020).
Multiplied displacement, we argue, provides an analytical framework for gathering and examining displacement experiences, processes, and governance through and “across a range of what may otherwise be dissimilar events and experiences, highlighting shared elements” (Delaney, 2004, 848) in locally specific but globally connected urban contexts. It helps us understand how seemingly different structures, processes, and forms of—as well as attempts to govern—displacement are bound together through global capitalism, dispossession, racialization, and violence; in turn enabling us to focus on the confluence of multiple displacement processes in cities and to scrutinize the increasingly interwoven means, practices, and spaces through which they are governed. Because it attempts to capture overlapping processes and experiences of displacement, the concept makes it possible to draw connections between “different” displaced populations and their experiences, including marginalized and racialized urban populations who face a series of deprivations—“including ‘dumping’, ‘containment’ and ‘stigmatisation’” (Hill et al., 2021, 260)—that can be productively compared against the condition of those internationally displaced (Sanyal, 2012). Lastly, multiplied displacement may be used to illuminate the ways in which displacement (and the urban practices of the displaced)—as one of the defining features of the twenty-first century—has come to be an essential form and process of current urban development: a global urban condition, including urban spaces that are increasingly created through and shaped by multiple, intersecting displacements. Studying and theorizing displacement will therefore “speak back to the theorisation of cities” (Sanyal, 2023), furthering the ways we conceptualize and theorize cities and urban spaces as “sites that receive displaced populations, as well as engender displacement through urban development” (Huq and Miraftab, 2020, 353). Examining the movement and trajectories of internationally displaced migrants in cities, the urban geographies and spatialities they traverse, become ensnared in, or produce, and the manner in which they are governed through migration, mobility, and urban governance regimes, can be a starting point to examine the interconnectedness between various forms and scales of global displacement processes—urban and international ones included—as well as the relevance of race and racialization for understanding them.
Theorizing displacement from the experiences of those displaced, as Hirsh and colleagues (2020) suggest, and going beyond often limiting understandings of displacement in urban and migration studies, can contribute to an empirically grounded understanding of multiplied displacement. This may include empirical research that connects these processes and experiences of displacement, for example through meta-studies and through comparative and longitudinal research that focuses on displacement processes, practices, and conditions through the eyes of the displaced. Considering that “the massive forced and unforced migration of people now taking place in the world […] will have as much if not greater significance in shaping urbanization in the 21st century as the powerful dynamic of unrestrained capital mobility and accumulation” (Harvey, 1996, 25), connecting multiplied displacement to planetary processes of urbanization and dispossession would produce knowledge about the very meaning of space, place, and displacement—not just as spatial formations, structures, and processes within the boundaries of what is seen as “the city,” but as an urban condition through which “the ‘cracks’ in the workings of oppressive power” are revealed and capitalist urban order is contested through reclaiming agency, movement, and livable spaces (Sanyal, 2014, 569). A relational understanding of urban processes enables us to understand how displacements are constituted in time and space, and with regard to the constituency of space and place. Because “displacement is neither peripheral nor temporary but a central part of the rapid urbanization” (Bakonyi and Chonka, 2023, 9), especially in the Global South, further thinking about “multiplied displacement” in relation to recent ideas on the “displacement-urbanization nexus” (O’Loghlen, 2015) and “displacement urbanism” (Astolfo, 2023; Sanyal, 2023) may therefore reveal the ways in which the urban condition is created through multiple, multiplied, and intersecting displacements.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.