Invisible Displacement

By directing our gaze, we also avert our eyes. It is widely recognized—though the implications are rarely consistently analysed—that all perspectives are partial, and that therefore by seeing, describing and categorizing social reality, we also make people and processes invisible. This special edition discusses the many aspects of invisibility in refugee and forced migration studies: at the conceptual level, from the perspective of forced migrants, in relation to policy, and from the perspective of academic knowledge production. A critical look at invisibility begs a series of questions. It asks not only who or what is invisible, but invisible to whom, in what ways, and why. The ‘who or what’ refers to various groups and processes that have long been part of the experience of displacement, but which were only ‘discovered’ by academics and policy makers as a new area of concern at a particular point in time. A well known example is the category of internally displaced persons, but there are many others. The question ‘invisible to whom’ reminds us of the range of actors in displacement situations, where a group, such as IDPs, may have been invisible to the United Nations and to ‘refugee studies’ academics, but very visible to the International Committee of the Red Cross, local governments and residents of the areas into which people were forced to move. Invisibility is therefore fundamentally relational; its impacts depend on the power relations and interests connecting those who see and those who are to be seen (or not). Invisible ‘in what way’ asks us to consider the categories we apply to people and situations and the functions those categories fulfil. What has been the impact of categorizing IDPs as displaced persons rather than citizens, thereby making the same individuals visible and actionable to different institutions, under different rules and with different outcomes?