Disability and displacement in times of conflict: Rethinking migration, flows and boundaries

In this paper, I try to understand the changed relationship of conflict to migration as seen through a lens of fluidity and what that entails for disabled people - particularly what boundaries and borders are at stake. Secondly, I investigate migration through the idea of ‘ontological insecurity’ and try and link this to ideas of (dis)/ableism. Then, I attend to what happens when boundaries are enforced in the humanitarianism of a refugee camp, to explain how territoriality of such a setting unmakes people into ‘strangers’. I show how the structural violence of poverty leads to a necessary fluidity and illustrate how people use this to combat the ‘unmaking’ of the self and reinsert themselves back into social life and relationships. Lastly, I examine the place of biolegal politics in medical humanitarianism and explore the relationship to ‘necropolitics’ and its consequences.

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2015, Vol. 2 No. 1