Panel 10: Displacement Economies: Paradoxes of Crisis and Creativity in African Contexts

Displacement is a term that encompasses a range of spatial and symbolic processes associated with diverse forms of (mainly) forced movement and/or enclosure. African realities have been marked by both larger and smaller scales of displacement over many centuries – including in eras of slavery, colonial dispossession, liberation wars and post-colonial conflicts, urban and rural ‘development’ projects, and various aspects of state making. These continue to have multiply layered effects on the continent’s demographic, spatial, social, economic and political landscapes. Of particular interest in this panel is the understanding that displacement is necessarily produced by and sustained through specific political, political-economic and socio-cultural conditions, and in turn produces new forms of political, social and economic relations and practices at both micro and macro levels. It is this dynamic articulation and dialectic of co-production that generates the kinds of paradoxes that we seek to understand through the notion of ‘displacement economies’. Drawing on a range of empirically grounded research from contexts across the continent, with theoretically and methodologically varied yet complimentary approaches, the papers that will be presented in this panel collectively seek to interrogate the following inter-related questions: what happens to economic logics, to definitions of value, to relations and practices of production and reproduction, to forms of exchange and modes of accumulation and distribution (at multiple scales), under conditions of displacement.