Global Development Institute podcast
Global Development Institute podcast
In Conversation: Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia on home and internal displacement in Colombia
In this episode, we speak to GDI alumnus and research fellow Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia about his recent open access book, A Long Journey Home: Losing and Remaking Home Following Conflict and Displacement. The book examines the experiences of those whose sense of home has been disrupted by decades of conflict and violence, highlighting the profound feelings of loss and the enduring struggle of living without a home. Luis Eduardo discusses his findings in depth, including various ways in which home is conceptualised, lost, and remade in the lives of displaced people.
Find out more about the Global Development Institute:
Intro music Anna Banana by Eaters
Speaker 1 [00:00:01] Welcome to the Global Development Institute podcast. Based at the University of Manchester, we're Europe's largest research and teaching institute addressing poverty and inequality. Each episode will bring you the latest thinking, insights, and debate in development studies.
Speaker 2 [00:00:31] Hi everyone and welcome to the Global Development Institute podcast. I'm Louisa Hahn, Research Communications Officer here at GDI, and I'm really pleased to be joined today by Luis Eduardo Perez Mercier to discuss his new book, A Long Journey Home Losing and Remaking Home Following Conflict and Displacement. Welcome Luis Eduardo.
Speaker 3 [00:00:52] Thank you, Louisa. Thank you very much for this opportunity. I'm very pleased to be here.
Speaker 2 [00:00:57] It's a pleasure. So just to introduce you a little bit, Luis Eduardo is an honorary research fellow here at GDI and one of our fantastic alumni. He completed a PhD with us, pursuing a thesis that examined the intersections between armed conflict, forced migration and home, with a particular empirical focus on internally displaced people in Colombia. Following the PhD, Luis Eduardo held research positions at the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento and the Matt Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Dersity. His research interests include conflict studies, forced migration, transnationalism, family relationships, home studies, and ethnographic research methods. And his empirical research focuses on Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, and the UK. So let's just kind of start with a general overview of the book, which I understand is built on some of the research you conducted during your PhD. So what does your book aim to uncover? What is its kind of overarching thesis and how did it evolve from your studies?
Speaker 3 [00:02:10] Okay, thank you, Louisa, for the question. Okay, three elements here. First of all, this research started at the Global Development Institute when I was doing my PhD. And I met the families in 2014. And I was thinking about the idea of home for people who move because of violence and human rights abuses, and really not happy with the different frameworks addressing questions of displacement. So, just to give you an idea, I was very concerned that most of research on forced migration tends to focus on the loss of material assets, a physical shelter, a plot of land, and this kind of very important things that lead people to poverty. But I was thinking that there is something more that people lose than could be really significant for understanding their lives. And in that time, I just started reading Hannah Arin and was so fascinated about this idea of a reflection of what happened with the refugees during the second world war, moving and being deported to concentration camps. And she said something like they lose the sense of home. And I was really looking forward to what is that, what is home, what how people conceptualize home, and she didn't. So I just took the idea and started reading broaderly on refugee studies and in refugee studies talk a lot about home, but not in displacement research. I mean in internal displacement. Why not? Home was kind of understood within national borders. So I wanted to conduct an empirical research, thinking and discussing with people what and where is home for those who flee because of violence and human rights abuses and never cross borders. So that was the initial insight of the research. And so I I just worked with this idea during my PhD, complete the PhD, but keep in contact with the families for many years. And in that case, I just have the plan to write the book, and this is the reason for the long term ethnography, talking with people at different moments of their life. And the book that we are talking today addressed three main elements. How is life when people experience the loss of a sense of home? And then the second part is about how is living without the sense of home for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. Imagine yourself without a place to call home. In English, for example, people use. The word every day. I'm going home, see you at home, I prefer stay at home. What does it mean for internally displaced people for 30 years having no this kind of place or attachment? And then the last part of the book addressed the experience of those very few participants I want to emphasize who were able to remain home in the context of Colombia, but away from their original communities. So this is basically what the book is about.
Speaker 2 [00:05:07] Great. Yeah. And I really look forward to kind of getting a bit more into that idea of a poem and and how it's quite kind of a protein concept, but also, yeah, means something very sp specific in these contexts. So much of our audience will probably have some awareness of the kind of the instabilities and and the conflicts that have impacted Colombia over the last several decades, but might be wondering about how this has shaped life in the country. So could you just provide us with you know a very kind of brief political and historical context to help fill some of those potential gaps?
Speaker 3 [00:05:40] Okay, I will try to be sure because Colombia has a very long history of conflict. Just to give you an idea. In the 19th century, we have nine civil wars. And we start the 20th century with what is calling in our context a thousandth war, day war. So it was war was kind of every day in our past. And in the 20th century, in the middle of the 20th century, between 1945 and 65, we have 20 years of continued violence that in Spanish is called La Violencia, a period of constant, really cruelty violence that affects civilians. So this is kind of the background. But in the 1985, the word escalate because an emerge a new actor emerged in that conflict with more kind of thought that was paramilitary groups. So the war started really to affect civilians because of the actions of paramilitary groups, right wing, paramilitary groups, guerrilla members or normally oriental left wing and the army. So they commit all kinds of human rights abuses. I am talking about mass killings, torture, rape, in particular against women, forced disappearance of civilians, for recruiting of children, family separation with killings. So in all these countries, in particular in rural areas, people have really little opportunities to live, so they flee because fled because of the search of safety and try to find a safe space in the main cities of Colombia. So I will say that is the context. Colombia reached a peace agreement with the oldest guerrilla group in 2016, and people might expect that because of that everything is fine, but surprisingly, and probably not surprisingly, because it's happening in any context with peace agreements. After a couple of years, the number of displaced people continue increasing. And in between 2017 and 2023, lots of people have moved and the violence continued for some of them. So many people who wanted to go back to their communities of origin, perhaps to remake a home, couldn't. And they still most of them in very difficult situations living in the main cities of Colombia.
Speaker 2 [00:08:07] Okay, great. That's really helpful. Thank you. So let's kind of talk a little a little bit more about this about this notion of home that we've touched on and the ways in which participants kind of navigate and search for and reconstruct home. And I wonder if you could say a little bit more about this definition of home, because I did note at the at the beginning of the book you kind of distinguished between being homeless and being without a dwelling, as it were. So you could kind of talk about that a little bit more.
Speaker 3 [00:08:35] Oh, yes. Thank you, Luisa. Yeah, home is a very, very complex issue with multiple layers and different disciplines have addressed this idea of home. So I needed a working definition of what is home to work with research participants in the field. So drawing on in particular anthropology, sociology, geography, and migration and refugee studies, I just started to conceptualize home and went into kind of three main elements home being multidimensional. Multidimensional means that home can be material and non-material at the same time. So, and that is the reason it's important to understand being homeless in physical terms or in emotional terms. You can have words and a roof, but you feel somewhat homeless. Why this is the case. So separating the material and the non-material aspect bring to the second aspect that home is relational. So people connect ideas of home to family, for example, to ideas of belonging and community. Where do you belong? Where do you want to belong? Where do you want to stay? To one extent you feel at home with your family, and this brings another layer of complexity. We often tend to romanticize home, but people, even those who never fled because of violence and human rights abuses, can face abuse within the domestic space, because for example, an abusive partner or abusive partner parents, whatever. So, home has to be really a space in which we acknowledge that alienation and violence happen even in context of not displaying. So I wanted to bring this idea of family, identity, and community. And the last aspect, what I call home is a dynamic space. Our relation to places and spaces is always changing. So we have memories of our home in our childhood that could be completely different in nowadays' life. And these tensions are really significant for understanding displacement. I would say, in particular, protected displacement when people have been living in displacement for many, many years and decades. So the home they remember perhaps no longer exists just in their memories. In summary, my understanding of home that I had built based on theories about home and different ethnographic studies that were published before. And my engagement with research participants, I will say that home is material, but also a social, political, cultural space. And above all, and this is one of the key ideas of my book, home becomes an spiritual and existential space. So you can be physically sheltered in the same place for years, but feeling existentially and spiritually homeless.
Speaker 2 [00:11:30] Great, thank you. That's a really good summary of it. I was also struck by how the loss and search for home altered or maybe kind of opened up people's attitudes towards their life course. And you know, how the sort of normative mar milestones of aging kind of occur. So could you talk about how displacement affected participants' view of the past, the future, and kind of the broader course of their life?
Speaker 3 [00:11:56] Yes, that that is a really interesting question because as I said, home is a dynamic space. So your ideas upon even you are not displaced at all with changing. But I will say that in context of war and human rights abuses, home acquires a particular resonance, and we need to consider time in this framework. So as I was already saying, people have a memory of what was home about, with whom he the person used to feel at home. So always thinking, and I draw here on Lisa Smallkey's word, that displacement become a kind of complex moment because people tend to separate life before and after displacement. But the present also matters. I am trying to say in the book. People have previous experiences of home, bad, good, whatever, but in the present, they have been living in displacement for 10, 20, or 30, 40 years. So that present is significant because connect the past experience of home when they're ambitious about home. I always remember one research participant who was displaced twice, and the second time she was raped by several members of a paramilitary group. When I met her for the very first time, talking about displacement and home, I asked Anilpa, tell me about what happened. And she told me, Luis Eduardo, the complex issue about displacement is that all your past, your present and your future are compromised. And she says something like following rape and displacement, I lost my home. And I lost part of my history. I struggle to live in the present and I see future nowhere. With this narrative, we can see how displacement and the loss of home compromise our tenses, our experience in the past, and how we live the present and envision the future. I will say.
Speaker 2 [00:13:55] And just kind of touching on the participant you mentioned there, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about the about the genders aspects of it as well in terms of yeah, kind of life course and and obviously there's quite different experiences between the male participants and the female participants that you you talk about.
Speaker 3 [00:14:13] Gender is a really significant aspect that really emerged from talking with my research participants. Many female research participants fled because they were raped. And after displacement, many of them were also raped by different or by the same actors. Just continue with this experience of Anilpa. The second time she was displaced, she was raped by different armored groups, by different paramilitary groups, the members of the same paramilitary group. And she was raped for a particular reason. She was raped because she was a lesbian. So, and this is a very important aspect because illegal armored groups try to control people's body, and in this particular case, women's body and women's sexuality. So she was organizing activities for LGBIDQ plus communities in Medellin, and the paramilitaries were unhappy with that and said you have to live. But before that, they raped her to help to teach her a lesson to become a woman, and ordered her not to be around women and just live. So, in that particular case, she said, I have two displacements with Eduardo. The very first time I was teaching students in rural Colombia, and the gorilla was trying to recruit my students and try to say, No, please no, they are my responsibility and they are meant to live. And I felt like okay, that was devastating. But the second time was even more devastating because they raped me, and they rape me because of who I am. And she said something like, I regret being a lesbian at that particular piece of time because I wasn't raped for being poor, for being black, for being already displaced. I was raped for being lesbian. So you can say this is kind of one case, but no, this repeats because illegal armored groups are all the time in that particular context regulating the behavior of men, women, families. And so gender becomes so significant. I will say to keep the conversation sure that in general, displacement and home are embodied and gendered. So gender is so significant for understanding different layers of complexity because men and women are fleeing from the same conflict but having different experiences. And it affects the body. Many women said my body is my home. So I wasn't not only approved from a particular place or a piece of land. I was approved from my body. And Luis Eduardo, it's kind of difficult in the context of Colombia to reveal your house. But how you reveal your own body when you are living with your body every day and saying, This is not me. So that is a very complex emotional issue that these women have been trying to navigate for many years.
Speaker 2 [00:17:12] Great. Thank you. And I suppose it's it's really related to that sense of identity and how they never navigate sort of the stigma that that comes with displacement as well. That's an element of it, isn't it? In terms of how other people view you in the world, I suppose.
Speaker 3 [00:17:27] That is a very, very important aspect. Lisa, thank you for yes, reaching that aspect because stereotypes and against displaced people happen in a different kind of in different contexts. So at the very beginning, for example, in the 1980s, when we start as a country to understand a little bit about displacement, but even today, people say, who are they? Why they are moving? If they move to the cities, maybe we are in danger, maybe they are not victims of violence, maybe they are criminals. So lots of stuff around this. But talking about gender and in particular about the experience of this woman, I have a section in the book that in which I explore this idea of how society perceives displaced people and how displaced people perceive themselves. And I found kind of very sad but fascinating at the same time that many women told me for many years I didn't feel like a person. Displacement and the loss of home compromise one sense of humanity. If you are raped for being who you are, or for whatever other reason, and you feel that your home is destroyed, you really start thinking who I am, who I want to be, and the relation with the family is also important because in many cases, for example, women keep silence for many years, never talk to nobody about the experience of rape. They say, I was displaced, but I don't want to talk about the details, and they were living kind of okay, what to do with that? It's impossible to keep all this secret. And for what you are not, it's not your your fault to be raped. But many women just start keeping silent and at some point told, okay, I have to be silent, but then joining social organizations, they started to find a way to talk about this. And it's really powerful how many of these women say after that, I just started to see myself again as a human being. I have one case that is so herbreaking, a woman who was forcibly recruited when she was 14 years old by the guerrilla. She was raped by the gorilla, and she was able to escape, but she couldn't go back to her family for a good reason. She was an easy target again. So with no education, no possibility, she engaged with the sex industry. Imagine yourself after being raped, working in the sex industry for 20 years. So she said, I wasn't really a person. I never felt at home in the guerrilla, never felt at home. She called the sex industry the dark world. In the dark world, she said, you can't see home. So living with that was all day, all every day thinking, who I am. I am not really a person. I can talk about what I am doing. But then she discovered something that is great in therapy. We can talk about that later. And in that process, that is emotional healing, she was able to discover a new person, a new identity, and become a writer in the making.
Speaker 2 [00:20:39] Yeah, such an interesting story and such a kind of testimony the testimony to strength, I suppose. So let's talk a little bit about aging. Because you had, I don't know, I suppose the privilege of being able to interview people at various stages in their lives. So how does how does aging affect the experiences of of displacement and making home? And what kind of differences did you perceive between younger and older participants, as well as, you know, how their testimonies changed when you met up again with them a few years down the line?
Speaker 3 [00:21:13] No, no, okay. Very interesting and very complex questions to address. Because we tend to kind of create clear cloud boundaries in the way that youth people and older people navigate the spinnings of displacement. And honestly, I at the very beginning, I have this idea because we got found in the literature that normally youth people tend to really be able to reconstruct their lives somehow more easily than older people, and in somehow they can be remained home in any context. And then just thinking that older people can do that for obvious reasons as well, because they have been living 40, 50 years in the same place. Probably they envision the rest of their lives there. So this very initial moment, you can say, okay, that was what I found in 2014, doing my fever for my PhD. So youth people told me, yes, okay, that is awful, but this is the place for my parents. We are now really embracing the opportunities here. Please be in mind that many displaced people escape from areas where very rural Colombia with little opportunities for education, no universities, not really a job market. So they encounter cities like Bogota and see, okay, this is not our place, but we can take advantage of the opportunities here. So in that case, they were able to engage with the city to adopt new social and cultural practices and eventually remain home. But older people were always missing the home because many of them they were really happy in the communities, even despite the mess of the war, they navigate these tensions. So they were living there and say, okay, that was my place, and I wanted to be there. But this engagement with the same participant for many years just give you different ideas that made the idea of home and aging more complicated. Aging in displacement. We often tend to think about aging from when. So we are stare, in my view, aging start the very first day you see life. So the next day you are older 50% not the double age. So but focusing only on certain people of from certain age could be problematic. So two examples, and I will be try to be quick. A man who fled when he was 16 years old because seven members of his family were killed. So he arrives at Bogota with siblings. I interviewed him when he was in his early 20s in 2014. And he said, okay, I want to keep all that as part of my past, but now I am doing a bachelor's degree that probably never had in my community, and I will succeed in this city and eventually remain home here. Years later, in 2023, he told me, Luis Eduardo, I could really make a home here. I always think about my community. He is a black man from the Pacific of Coast of Colombia. And in that particular community, they have a ritual. When children born, their parents stay part of the umbilican core and put and tomb that in a peace on land and plant a tree. So many years later, he was telling me, Luis Eduardo, I always think that definitely I cannot make home anywhere. I always think about my tree because my roots are there, but I haven't not been able for all this year to go back there. And now he was very young at that time again in 2023. And now he said, I am living with a life treatening disease, and I definitely see that there is home nowhere for me. Only there, because that tree is part of me. In 2023, nearly 17, some were able to say to visit the place, and many discovered that home was no longer there. And many said, I have reluctantly to accept that home is not there, not here. So if I want a home for me for my rest of my life, I need to commit to the new place, adapt myself, and create a new home here. So the tension between aging, home and displayment are so difficult to navigate and fascinating to investigate, because these tensions emerged. In your everyday life. Today you may feel at home, but tomorrow no, because you have a disagreement with your partner or with your mother or whatever. But then you can reveal. Of course we cannot compare that with people whose parents were killed or women who were raped. I I am just saying that because home is a very slippery concept. And this is probably what is most fascinating about doing research about home.
Speaker 2 [00:26:35] And sort of related to that, what I found quite interesting in the book was a kind of a preoccupation of with with kind of of dying at home for some of the participants. Whether that I don't know whether that means home as in where they were born or home as in having made a home somewhere else. I wonder if you could just touch on that a little bit about that kind of existential, broader picture sort of worry.
Speaker 3 [00:26:58] Yes, you hear different narratives, and I will say that it's important to keep gender and ethnicity also in this conversation. It's not just aging, but the fear of aging out of place, edging away from what people call, for example, indigenous communities and black people, their roots is so significant because they are concerned about living in displacement away from their communities, with no possibility to pass on their tradition and social cultural practice to their, for example, children and grandchildren. So they feel that they had failed our parents or grandparents because their responsibility was keeping their families in what they call their place. So living in Bogota, with children adopting a different culture, different tradition, different, for example, in many cases, language, because in some cases indigenous speak their own language, but they have to learn Bogota to go to school and for practical reasons, but they feel that their culture is just missing or losing in that process. So they really feel or continue living here and they want to die at home. But what is dying at home if you go back and see that the home no longer exists? So dying at home is probably in the space that you imagine mine feeling that you are spiritually and existentially at home, and that could be anywhere. So this tension between living aging out of place, edging in displacement, and trying to go back the back is not always clear. But it's a tension between here, there, and for many displaced people in the context of my research is definitely nowhere rather than in their imagination or the memories of the home. So this is an issue that I believe there's much more research. Going with different people living in displacement for different number of years and seeing how they are aging in those places and what is home for the future.
Speaker 2 [00:29:09] Great, thank you. So I don't want to keep you you for too long, but another question that I think we should touch on is concerning the chapter you wrote about the kind of the role material objects have played in the lives of participants. So yeah, if you could just tell us a little bit more about that.
Speaker 3 [00:29:27] Okay, material cultures and what I call everyday materialities, moon dynobjects, play a very significant role in the spirits of displaced people and in the making of a home. And to keep short the conversation, I am going back to the experience of Anilba, the woman who was raped in the second displacement. The very first time she was displaced, she was able to carry some of the material stuff. And she had been always a writer. And she had a book, a notebook about her everyday life, tales about her life is something like she called that. And the first time she was displaced, she carried the boot with her, the notebook. But then during the second time, paramilitaries destroy everything. They just keep everything and she just escaped alone with no material objects. So when talking about the second displacement, she said, the very first time I was displaced, I have the feeling that I was able to remain home because I have part of my history with me. This notebook was the most essential thing for me. But the second time she couldn't. So she has to navigate the loss of home, rape and the self-real home without very ordinary object, a notebook. So she eventually, after many years about also engaging with writing therapy and a process of personal healing, she told me, Luis Eduardo, I have to accept that the objects that I that helped me to feel at home only exists here in my memory. But it took me years to get to that idea. So now my tales, my history is part of me. So I now ready because of the process of healing to reveal my life to try to make a home with this part of my history that is here and here. I mean in my head, in my memories and in my heart. So but for many people, that is not possible. People need ordinary things, a photo, something that keeps you attached to that particular place. And if I have a couple of minutes more to say of this, I have a fascinating history of a research participant who created a home after many years of displacement, and before her mother was dying, her mother gave her a piece of crockery. And she kept that for many, many years brand new. When she was able to rebuild the home, she put the piece of crockery in the living room. And when I was asking, tell me about that, she said, That is my mother in the house. My mother was the most significant figure in my idea of home. I wanted to keep that central in my house because every day when I see that crockery, I see my mom there. So I feel somewhat at home.
Speaker 2 [00:32:26] Great, thank you. So it'd be great if we could just wrap up by talking a little bit about I suppose the the participants that you work with, how did your relationship with them develop over the years? Are you still in touch with them and have ha you know, keeping up with their lives?
Speaker 3 [00:32:41] Yes. Because it was a kind of a long-term ethnography, 10 years, basically talking with many of the same people that in 2014. You have to really create what I try to describe in the book in the methodological section, a kind of caring relationship. Participants care about you in many ways, sharing their experience of violence, taking care of you when you are, for example, navigating kind of invisible borders in the neighborhoods they live that are sometimes very, very dangerous. So they protect you in many ways. And you also have to take care of them with very symbolic aspects. For example, after a conversation, when you see that talking about violence is kind of very heartbreaking for them. And also I will say for the researchers, a simple call the next day. How do you feel today? Or maybe the same day on the conversation. What about did we have a coffee? So you create relationships with them, and people appreciate this very ordinary gestures. In 2017, a year later, I finished my PhD with the support of the Global Development Institute. I have the opportunity to meet many of the research participants until then in the National Museum of Colombia. This is what I grow about your life. Tell me what you think. People were so kind of in positive shock. Luis Eduardo, it's amazing. It's the very first time we have researchers around that really care about us because you are showing us what you wrote about us. So they were so happy to continue contributing to my research. And I have, I normally don't like use WhatsApp or this kind of things, but I have all my research participants in WhatsApp, and I always keep an eye on their lives. Or for example, the two participants I mentioned that have published books. So I am really so proud, for example, to disseminate their books, sharing information with them, to participate in festivals, talking about their books, and all these kinds of things. So we I would not say we are friends, but the tensions and boundaries between being a research participant and researcher are so blurred. And sometimes I feel that we have become
Speaker 2 [00:35:06] Great. Yeah, so thanks so much for telling us all about the book. I guess I have a final question, which is are you working on anything at the moment?
Speaker 3 [00:35:17] Thank you for that question. As I said, I am very much interested in the idea of aging and dying in conditions of displacement. So I am writing a project about that. Hopefully, I will get the funding to deliver a project on this, making comparative research not only with internally displaced people in Colombia, but people moving around different migration corridors. And at this very moment, I am also working on the relationship between care work with transnational migrants in in Madrid, Spain, and trying to see how transnational families use care as an strategy to feel at home in the communities they settled. So this is kind of the things I am working on the moment.
Speaker 2 [00:36:06] Great, sounds really interesting. And good luck with the funding. So your book is available open access, so I'll add a link to the podcast description so everyone can take a look for themselves and have a read. And yeah, congratulations again on publishing such an interesting and vital book.
Speaker 3 [00:36:22] Thank you, Lisa. Thank you very much for the your interest in my research and thank you for this opportunity to share people what the book is about and hopefully to encourage them to read the book. Thank you.