AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	37. Political Economies of Displacement in Southern Africa
Paper ID	650
Author(s)	Wet, Chris John de
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	This paper argues that, in both colonial and post colonial times, displacement- both in the sense of people being physically uprooted, and in the sense of people being socio-culturally disoriented by such movement and other impositions - has been a defining characteristic of the southern African landscape. At one time, governments were sen as powerful enough to impose their will on people, and a capitalist-colonial political economy was seen as a sufficient explanatory mechanism for the displacement taking place in southern Africa, being behind apartheid, and largely responsible for the wars of decolonisation in southern Africa. After independence, while the ecomonic paradigm may have shifted in some cases, states were still seen as largely responsible for displacement, arising from their development and land reform programmes (often interpreted as intended to enhance their control over the rural population), or from refugee movements arising from conflict and civil war resulting from their oppressive regimes. Both before independnce and in the years son after it, displacment was to be understood in the context of a political economy that assumed the existence of a state strong enough to impose its will upon its people. It is therefore something of a paradox that attempts to address problems arising out of this previous dispossesion and displacement in the postcolonial situation have themselves led to further displacement, in both a physical and a socio-cultural sense. While states do have the power to disprupt and to displace, it appears that they do not necesarily have the wherewithal to undo such previous disruption and displacement. This is partly because such postcolonial states do not always have the local capacity and expertise to steer transformation in the way they may want to. It is also because such previous disruption at a local level sets processes in motion which build up a dynamic of their own- and which, together with local intentions and agency, in interaction with limited bureuacratic capacity- often make for a postcolonial political economic landscape (now less rigidly conceptualised in terms of the state and its powers) which, it seems, serves to perpetuate displacement. The ways in which such a recontextualised postcolonial political economic landscape serves to generate and perpetuate displacement will be illustrated through an examination of a number of case studies in South Africa and Zimbabwe. These case studies will attempt to understand displacement in terms of the interplay at the local level of human agency and wider social, political and economic forces, and to argue that we need to nuance our notion of political economy to include that level of interaction

Displacement as a Feature of the Southern African Political Economy and Landscape