‘Physically sheltered but existentially homeless’: Losing home in the aftermath of conflict and displacement

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the interplay between conflict-induced displacement and home. Inspired by Arendt’s discussion on home for those European refugees who were forced to move and deported to Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War, the article argues that displacement results in the loss of a place called home. Drawing on the narratives of those who in the aftermath of conflict have fled within national borders in Colombia, the article shows that displacement consistently results in the loss of home and it is experienced as the loss of people’s place in the world. Their loss of home was not only experienced as the loss of a physical shelter and its financial value but primarily as the loss of a place in which their lives were fulfilled with existential meaning. Despite the fact that the displaced found a new place for dwelling, most of them stressed the feeling of being out of place within their own country. The empirical findings challenge internal displacement research which rather than looking at how displacement disrupts one’s sense of home, has tended to focus on the loss of material assets and the subsequent risk of being trapped by poverty as the most salient impacts of displacement. The article ends by suggesting that the use of a notion of home which is material and symbolic, may provide internal displacement research with new venues for understanding both the very meaning of being displaced and how displacement is experienced.