Debunking migration and development. A dispossession and displacement studies approach

Abstract

Building on but extending the critiques of concepts of development and migration and development, this article offers a political economic analysis of dispossessive «growth and development». It speaks to contemporary crises including displacement actuated by the interlinked processes of physical mobility and downward social mobility. The article challenges the assumption that migration dynamics can be understood as separate from a global history of human mobility and settlement and the growth of imperial structures and networks of power, past and present. This analysis of multiscalar processes of accumulation by dispossession allows us to go beyond statistical or ethnographic descriptions of impoverishment and inequality and make sense of multiple contemporary forms of political rage including both racist reactionary forms of despair and anti-racist decolonizing social movements for equitable justice.