The Displacement

A post-governance age has no answers for the largest mass movement of people in history

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Right now, more people are forcibly on the move than at any other time in human history. This seems incredible, doesn’t it? It does to me, someone who grew up in a world captured by the progress narrative. Maybe it does to you if you grew up on a diet of media articles telling us “this is the best time to be alive in human history.”

For a long time my understanding was that any perturbations were just bumps on the road of inexorable progress. But this started to break down for me in my twenties. And I think lots of people are beginning to see the progress myth for what it always was. From climate breakdown to mass extinction, from soaring cancer rates to plummeting life expectancy, things aren’t getting better. They’re getting worse. Massive human displacement is the latest clue that fossil fuelled capitalist rule is not ushering in the promised land. It is creating wastelands. Wastelands that more and more people are trying desperately to flee. The great displacement is under way, and it will change our world.

A dramatic milestone

Let’s get the obvious objection out of the way first. Yes, there are more people than ever, but the percentage of the global population forcibly displaced has steadily increased over the last 50 years. From a little over 1% in the 1960s, 3.5% of people on earth today have fled their homes. This translates into more than 100 million people on the move. This means an astonishing 1 in every 78 people on the planet has been forced to leave their home in recent years. In 2012 the number was less than half of this, at around 40 million. The UN Refugee Agency calls the 100 million mark “a dramatic milestone that few would have expected a decade ago.” In just the first few months of 2022, 11.8 million people were forced from their homes. Not since the second world war have so many people around the world had to flee in fear. And international migration is increasing 2.5% per year.

The reasons are much as they ever were - war and political violence - but with one major new variable: extreme weather boosted by climate breakdown. Of the 59.1 million people internally displaced in 2021, most were displaced by climate-related disasters, far higher than displacement due to armed conflict. In Pakistan, climate-intensified floods have displaced more than 30 million people.

The post-governance age

The great displacement is another facet of our world in upheaval that the mass media often talk about, but almost never ask the right question. Why during the best time to be alive in human history™ are more people fleeing their homes than ever before?

Because what we are seeing is the logic of the forty-year neo-liberal experiment play out. That logic is of a world without rules. A free-for-all that only the strongest and richest could (and should) survive. The libertarian dream of the end of order. Well, welcome to the end of order. Welcome to the post-governance age. An age in which the freedom to pollute has created more displaced people than armed conflict. An age in which international governance is being deliberately broken in order to further the reach of financial capital, regardless of the human cost – and sometimes gleeful of that cost.

There’s a reason why famed libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel believes simultaneously in a rules-free world and supports Trump and his bigger, badder border wall. There is a reason why libertarian Brexit Britain is allowing virtually lawless “free port” zones for multinational companies to do whatever they want but has a national breakdown at the sight of dinghies. There is an essentially moralistic, even psychopathic logic underpinning all this: rich people earned their wealth, therefore they (and their money) deserve freedom. If you don’t have money, you don’t deserve that same freedom. Britain is a good example. You can still leave Brexit Britain and migrate to the continent if you have enough cash. The end of free movement between the EU and UK only ended free movement for the poor.

Burkino Faso

One major new displacement hotspot is Burkino Faso, not long ago considered a relatively safe country. But now one in ten – more than 2 million people - have been forced from their homes. Many face acute hunger. Why? Because Al Qaeda and Islamic State are on the march, two entities birthed from the imperial bloodlust of American foreign policy. In 2015 Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, a former banker, was elected president, and with the support of the US government one of his first acts was tearing up the deal that enabled jihadists to get safe passage and medical treatment in exchange for leaving the country. Backed into a corner with quite literally no way out, jihadists began large scale attacks. The prior deal might have kept the lid on violence, but it looked too much like governance.

We have seen this time and again in the last decade. From the US-Iran deal to the Minsk treaty between Russia and Ukraine, messy but essential peace deals keep getting ripped up in a post-governance age, often replaced with violence. And if the libertarian Brexiteers had got their way, peace in Northern Ireland would be in tatters. They still might.

Something has changed

A libertarian order with a mania for money but disdain for rules has unleashed this hell on millions and now refuses to take any responsibility. Because that would mean agreeing on rules. The UNHCR itself hints that something fundamental has changed. “The international community can take action, to redouble efforts to share responsibilities and find durable solutions, which could reverse the current trend, bringing displacement levels down significantly. Historically, solutions for outflows from displacement situations have been available.”

You see the language of “can” a lot these days from the UN. In the communiques about climate change or ecological breakdown, the UN tells us the world “can” reduce emissions, “can” stop the destruction of the natural world. Yes, of course, countries “can” always take action. The question is not whether the elites that run our countries have the capacity to take action, but whether they have the will. They don’t. And especially not to save the lives of poor brown people.

Hustling north

Yet as bad as it already is, the great displacement has only just started. The climate crisis is set to supercharge displacement, acting as a force multiplier in places where conditions are already precarious. And some climate migration will be purely about heat – about survival. On average, climate niches – the range of conditions at which species can survive – are moving towards the poles at a pace of 1.15m (3.8ft) per day.

And species are hustling north, chasing their climate niche. Humans will be next. Heat that will kill a fit and healthy person in a few hours is predicted to strike a growing number of areas as fossil fuel burning continues. People will soon be faced with a stark but simple choice: flee your home or cook to death.

Already this dynamic is playing out in central America, where heat, drought and failing crops are forcing record numbers of people to head north and to the US. In the US itself, three million people lost their homes to a climate crisis enhanced disaster last year. In the UK, entire villages that have been home to families for hundreds of years are in the process of being decommissioned, where within 30 years they will be abandoned to the rising sea. This has already happened on the US south coast, inhabited islands off the coast of Louisiana swallowed by the rising Gulf waters.

How much worse could it get?

The UN’s international organisation for migration says there might be as many as 1 billion environmental migrants in the next 25 years or so. This might not be so far off the mark. A 2020 study said one to three billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that humans in those areas have come to know and thrive in over the past 6,000 years. Within countries, The World Bank says more than 200 million people could be internally displaced by climate impacts by 2050.

A predictable response

We know what the response will be because it is happening now: increasingly punitive and violent reactions and the construction of new border walls. Alongside the largest mass migration in human history, the world is currently witnessing the most rapid proliferation of border walls in history. Governments considered the best of a bad bunch, such as the socialist-led coalition in Spain, call attempted migrant crossings “attacks” and heap praise on border agents when they massacre migrants. Germany’s genuinely decent response to the arrival of one million Syrians worked astonishingly well, with most finding work and integrating into communities. In 2020 however the tone had changed. A social media campaign was launched to disuade more Syrians from coming. In 2021, neighbouring Denmark cruelly stripped Syrians of their residency cards, telling them to go home. Compassion became politically toxic, seized on by the far right and the media, and in Germany it helped end Angela Merkel’s reign.

So we should expect more of the same. The only way we can change this is by changing the system. By getting rid of borders that trap the poor, while the elites and their money are free to roam. By ending a capitalist growth system that creates the pollution, the violence and the instability that drives displacement.

Ultimately we have to break free of the conditioning that tells us that changing the system in this way is “unrealistic” or “utopian.” To have any chance at a decent future, we have to realise that ideas derided as utopian are, in fact, the only way we get out of this mess.

(Cover art by @ronniefurbear on IG)