Where the Heart Is and Where It Hurts: Conceptions of Home for People Fleeing Conflict

Abstract

This article introduces a new framework for conceptualising home which brings together physical, social, cultural, and spiritual, emotional–existential factors in order to examine the multiple meanings conflict-induced displaced people attach to the idea of home and how the sense of being or not being at home shapes their material and symbolic well-being. Drawing on the life experiences of those who in the aftermath of conflict have fled within national borders in Colombia, it argues that the displaced understand home not only as the physical or geographical place left behind but foremost as the social world, familiar landscape, and spiritual, emotional–existential space where their lives were fulfilled with material, spiritual and emotional–existential meaning. Thus, their sense of being away from home is not only experienced as the sense of being deprived from a physical shelter but primarily as the sense of being spiritually, emotionally and existentially homeless. Empirical findings suggest that rather than being an unproblematic, unidimensional and confined space those who are forced to move unequivocally want to return to, conflict and displacement make home a contested, multidimensional, relational and dynamic space where both the traumatic and the joyful experiences from the place left behind and new settings coexist.