Urban Displacement and Peace Building: An Analysis of South African Social Cohesion Interventions

More than half of the world’s refugees are found in urban environments (UNHCR 2009). In addition to the urbanisation of refugees, other forms of migration (forced and voluntary), civil wars, and conflict dynamics increasingly affect urban spaces. Understanding urban dynamics is crucial, and yet extremely challenging for organisations. The urban displaced are often highly mobile and difficult to access, targeted by other residents as outsiders, and with insecure housing and livelihood options (Landau 2004). As a consequence of targeted discrimination and violence by host ‘communities’, many displaced persons choose to become “invisible” and deny their foreigner identity (Davies and Jacobsen 2010, 13; Montemurro and Walicki 2001, 11; Landau 2004; Pavanello, Elhawary, and Pantuliano 2010; Zetter and Deikun 2010). Humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding organisations, accustomed to the more straightforward delineation between host and refugee in acamp setting, have a difficult time grappling with urban realities, and how the urban displaced navigate their citie (Refstie, Dolan and Okello 2010, 33; Vearey 2009). The context of urba South Africa is highlighted by these key characteristics of urban displacement: diversity, mobility, insecurity, and invisibility. Meanwhile, the international peacebuilding culture1 was not designed with urban spaces in mind, even though conflict dynamics routinely affect urban space and peacebuilding toolkits will increasingly be deployed to these spaces. Momentum has steadily grown since the 1990s to promote peacebuilding actors’ sensitivity to conflict dynamics in their interventions (Meharg 2009; International Alert et al. 2004; Chigas and Woodrow 2008). However, the conflictsensitive theories and tools used for peacebuilding interventions are similarly devoted to international interventions in a civil war or political crisis.