Refugee Communities

Refugee Communities in Exile: Change, Restructuring, and Consolidation

Despite the profoundly disturbing impacts of forced exile and the sense of loss, a pathologizing view of community breakdown is not the only perspective, at least not beyond the short term. Extensive research evidence from many refugee populations in many different settlings demonstrates the remarkable resilience of refugee community structures and how the social capital of these groups provides the capacity to survive, adapt, and rebuild, as well as to reform and restructure, in often unpropitious circumstances. The research confirms the role of community organizations in sustaining communities in exile pending return as well as in facilitating integration for those who do not repatriate. From a researcher's point of view, the lens of forced displacement can provide significant insights into the dynamics of community, precisely because the processes of community building undergo such rapid transformation.

A key point to emphasize in any analysis of refugee communities is their heterogeneity. Communities take on many different forms of association and organization in exile. Although disparate refugee groups are bound by their common experience, it is nevertheless rare to find community groups that embrace different nationalities of refugees. Instead communities tend to form around preexisting identities. Even so, fragmentation, reconstitution into subgroups, diversity, and the emergence of new allegiances are typical characteristics of many communities in exile. These characteristics reflect the wider cleavages found in the pre-exodus society back home as well as the pressures of the struggle to survive and come to terms with exile.

Longitudinal research that has focused on different displaced populations (for example, the Gwembe Tonga, displaced in the 1950s to accommodate construction of the Kariba Dam in Zambia, or Greek Cypriot refugees, or Vietnamese refugees) has resulted in a model of the different stages of transition through which communities in exile progress.

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