ABSTRACT
Refugees dream of new and different lives. In this chapter, Ramsay details the general insecurity that pervades the lives of refugees in protracted situations of asylum, where they must create independent livelihoods without the privileges associated with citizenship. Many refugees imagine that resettlement to a Western nation will resolve the insecurity of displacement. This assumption is also embedded in the global humanitarian system, which designates only three “durable solutions” to displacement, of which resettlement is one. But resettlement, which is provided to less than one per cent of refugees each year, can be a source of cruel optimism: an aspiration that compels refugees to endure, and in some cases exacerbate, insecurity without considering other options to resolve their sense of being displaced. Theorising forced migration as a mobility that is driven by both empirical and existential motivations, Ramsay develops the idea of the “resettlement imaginary” to refer to the symbolic power of the West in shaping the kinds of lives that refugees live in protracted situations of asylum.
