Apartheid, Destabilization and Displacement: The Dynamics of the Refugee Crisis in Southern Africa

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Abstract
This paper raises a number of issues concerning the prevalent conception of refugehood and displacement, and presents a materialist perspective to the understanding of the problem of population displacement in southern Africa. It argues that population relocation/refugehood is part of a broader process of population displacement, the former usually manifesting as an extreme effect of the latter. The process of displacement is itself rooted in the class struggle: the contradictory relations among classes, fractions, categories and strata. As such, displacement mirrors the power equation among contradictory social forces. Understood in this way, such factors as war, famine, government policy, coup d'etat and so on, which are commonly advanced as the causes of the refugee problem and population displacement generally, emerge as effects of the class struggle and secondary factors making for the relocation of people.

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