Déplacés de guerre dans la ville

La citadinisation des deslocados à Maputo (Mozambique)

Jeanne VIVET, 2012, Paris, Karthala; Johannesburg, IFAS
ISBN : 978-2-8111-0629-4
Coll. Hommes et sociétés

[Book in French]

This work examines the link between forced movement and urban citizenship, using a study carried out on rural people displaced by war and who took refuge in Maputo at the end of the 1980s, during the civil war of 1977-1992. Experiences of deterritorialisation and forced mobility are essential to understand the way displaced people settle in town. The coercive character of the displacement to Maputo, explains why the authorities and the majority of displaced people initially envisaged their presence in the city as temporary.

A city is above all a place where one takes refuge and lives for a short while, before it becomes a permanent place one can call home. Turning displaced people into urban citizens, results from a dialectic process which calls public policies as well as the urban, social and family context and their individual practices into play. While the exceptional character of the situation legitimates their presence at first, it often ends up making their situation even more illegitimate than that of other migrants, once the conflict has been sorted out.

Twenty years after their arrival, the fact that formerly displaced people decide to stay in town could not be construed univocally: for some, it testifies to positive territorialisation, economic and residential integration as well as a sense of belonging in Maputo; for others, on the contrary, it means that it would be impossible for them to return to their place of origin and the past, and therefore refers to forced immobility rather than urban citizenship.

Jeanne Vivet, former ENS-Lyon student, a qualified teacher in Geography and Doctor at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre, is currently conducting post-doctoral research work at the Social Science Institute of the University of Lisbon, on Angola and transnational families. Her thesis was rewarded by the 2011 French National Geography Committee.