21st Century: Forced Migration and the Right to Habitat

Abstract

Forced migration as a result of armed conflict, ecological, economic, or social disasters is being addressed more from the perspective of control and security than from that of the right to habitability and respect for human rights. Facilities for receiving forced migrants continue to use military camps as their main spatial reference. The first chapter of this work addresses the case of camps in Israel and Palestine as part of the State of Israel’s strategy of colonization and racial segregation. Both the non-European Jewish population and the Palestinian population turn these institutional spaces into spaces of resistance and community appropriation. We devote a second chapter to the case of settlements generated by internal and international migration in Chile and the criminalization of these spaces and the consequent threat of forced eviction. The third chapter is devoted to analyzing the temporary accommodation camps for migrants on Europe’s southern border. All these cases have in common that they are spaces of dispute over social, economic, and political rights, in which the right to habitat and other human rights appear to be violated.