Caught Between Definitions: Locating the Zimbabwean Internal Displacement within the Global Humanitarian Regime of Support

Internal displacement and other forms of forced migration have proved difficult to place in absolute categories. In the majority of cases, it can be acknowledged that the attempt to classift; these groups of people, who have been victims of some form of forced geographic relocation into concrete categories is largely restrictive, parochial and impracticable. Admittedly, these categorizations have (arguably) served their purpose in making individual countries (and the global community) efficiently and effectively give (appropriate) assistance to the vulnerable populations. However, this has also raised some new concerns about the groups of people who do not easily fall into the recognized categories. For such a people, humanitarian assistance and protection has been (inadvertently) slow and inadequate. In cognizance of the slippen; and contested nature of the internal displacement phenomenon in the Zimbabwean context, this paper makes an attempt to look at internal displacement and other forms of forced migration from an unorthodox angle. This essay questions the applicabilitt; of definitional umbrella terms and the subsequent suggested solutions to forced displacement attached to these. The paper uses the Capability Approach to enhance understanding of the plight of Internally Displaced Persons (ID Ps) as well as support the argument on the quest to recategorise this group of forced migrants in the Zimbabwean context. This qualitative essay uses empirical evidence gathered from a selected sample of displaced communities and humanitarian organisations in Zimbabwe to prove the prevalence of ID Ps in Zimbabwe. Furthermore, it makes use of the multiple discourses on the forced migration phenomenon at a global level and Zimbabwe in particular to cement arguments on how categorisations have affected IDPs in the country. The conclusions reached in this paper are that ID Ps in Zimbabwe have been victims of definitional rigiditt;. Therefore, they have suffered the subsequent effects of their (seeming) ~Address for Communication: *Department of Anthropology, University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. The Oriental Anthropologist, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2017, Pages 237-256 © OICSR, Allahabad Corresponding Author E-mail:naiduu@ukzn.ac.za 238 Maheshvari Naidu and Abigail Behura failure to fit into the common categories of forced migrants at a socio-political and economic level. Thus, in order to qualifiJ for protection and the relevant assistance, ID Ps in Zimbabwe have to be viewed in a different pr"spective than their current status dictates.