The space-time of forced refuge: colonial villagization in the formation of the state?

Abstract

In times of a purported refugee crisis, it is urgent to undertake a genealogy of present-day conceptions of refuge in Europe, examining how the latter articulate a colonial rationality, eliding the persistent unequal circuits of labour and subjectivity between European states and erstwhile occupied territories. The paper defends that built environment studies can contribute to this project due to their attention to the dimensions of the social space-time of refuge, relating politics, inequality, and phantasy. It recalls European colonial villagization in the mid-Twentieth-Century as a space of forced displacement that rehearses the relation of the state with the refugee subject, focusing on a revision of the extant literature on the Portuguese colonial villagization program in Mozambique.