ABSTRACT
Academic research on forced migration tends to concentrate on specific events, usually droughts or armed conflicts, and to treat ‘refugees’ as a sui generis category. Policy definitions of refugees are informed by a short-term perspective and coined during ‘emergencies’ and ‘crises’ such as conflicts, droughts and famines. Such a perspective tends to hinder understanding of root causes underlying forced migration and their cyclical character and to reproduce short-term solutions which fail to address ecological and political factors. Data analysis of an anthropological study 1 –carried out in the aftermath of the 1990–96 conflict in northern Mali – suggests that isolating the category of ‘refugee’ from other variations of spatial mobility, including transhumance, economic migration, exile and displacement, can obscure the long term political and economic implications of mobility and its causes.
