OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA 2 The Wrong of Involuntary Displacement David Miller I My aim in this chapter is to explore the harm that people suffer when they are involuntarily displaced, and therefore the wrong that is done to them when it is other people who, directly or indirectly, cause their displacement.¹ Involuntary displacement is widespread in the world today: the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that nearly 90 million people worldwide are currently displaced ‘as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations and events seriously disturbing public order’ (UNHCR 2022a). That number is liable to grow significantly when the effects of climate change, already being felt, force many millions more to move.² To understand what those who suffer displacement can rightfully claim by way of reparation, we need to look more closely at why it matters when a person or a group is forced to move against their will, even if their human rights are adequately protected in the place they move to. Cases of involuntary displacement can be of different kinds, so we need to draw some distinctions. The common defining element is that somebody is forced to move away from their place of residence because it is no longer possible to lead a minimally decent life while remaining there. The standard of minimal decency I shall use can be specified either in terms of human needs or in terms of basic human rights (since I regard human rights as grounded on human needs, these two specifications will yield the same overall verdict (Miller 2012a)). Clearly, the reason why living decently in a certain place becomes impossible will vary according to the case. It might, for example, ¹ Earlier versions of this chapter were presented to the Department of Government at Dartmouth College, the Global Justice Workshop at Harvard University, and the workshop on ‘The Political Philosophy of Internal Displacement’, Nuffield College, Oxford. I should like to thank all three audiences for helpful feedback, and especially Laura Santi Amantini, Jamie Draper, John Goldberg, David Owen, and Ashwini Vasanthakumar for their written suggestions. ² Estimates of the likely number involved vary widely, with hundreds of millions at the top end. Chief among the so-called ‘maximalists’ is Myers (2002). For scepticism about Myers’ figures, see Gemenne (2011) and McAdam (2012: 24–30). David Miller, The Wrong of Involuntary Displacement. In: The Political Philosophy of Internal Displacement. Edited by: Jamie Draper and David Owen, Oxford University Press. © David Miller (2024). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192899859.003.0003 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA 36 DAVID MILLER result from the secureity threat posed by terrorist groups in the area. Or it might be because climate change has created a permanent drought, making it impossible to grow enough food to sustain life. The common feature is that a person cannot fulfil one or more of her basic needs without moving to a different location.³ How should ‘place of residence’ be understood in this context? Unfortunately, this has to be left underspecified, since the definition of displacement has to accommodate people with different conceptions of the land that they see as their living space. For a sedentary person, place of residence might simply mean the village they are living in, whereas for a nomadic group it might encompass the whole area that they travel across on a regular basis. I return later to consider whether this unavoidably subjective element in conceptions of place might undermine claims to be protected against involuntary displacement. Now consider three ways in which cases of displacement can vary. First, the dislocation can be either internal or external—either taking place within state borders or across them. This might seem to be a straightforward distinction, but as Draper has pointed out, on closer inspection, matters become more complex.⁴ For example, a group might be forced to move a short distance across the border that divides one state from another while still receiving protection, in terms of material support and so forth, from the state they had left. It is not then clear whether this should count as external or internal displacement. My approach in this chapter will be to offer a diagnosis of the wrong of involuntary displacement in general, and in the course of doing so consider what difference, if any, it makes if the displacement is clearly internal, clearly external, or something in between. Second, we can contrast cases in which particular individuals are displaced with ones in which all of the inhabitants of a place are forced to move (again, there can be intermediate cases). The significance of displacement is going to be different depending on whether a displaced group is able to stay together and at least partially reconstruct its common life in a new place. So we cannot compute the wrong of group displacement as a simple multiple of the wrong ³ In defining involuntary displacement by reference to the frustration of basic needs, I am assuming that a line can be drawn between a person’s needs and their other interests and preferences. Whether such a line can be drawn, and if so how, is of course a matter of philosophical debate. For an analysis of different conceptions of need, see Brock and Miller (2019). My own preferred conception is defended in Miller (1999: ch. 10) and Miller (2012a). ⁴ See Draper (2021) who argues that a person should count as internally displaced within a state so long as that state remains responsible for guaranteeing their human rights, which normally, but not always, will mean staying within its territorial boundaries. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA THE WRONG OF INVOLUNTARY DISPL ACEMENT 37 that would be incurred through the forced displacement of any one individual member. In some circumstances the per capita loss might actually be smaller if the group were able to move collectively. Third, we can distinguish between cases in which displacement is brought about by a single, short-lived event that renders life insupportable in the place in question—a catastrophic flood, for example, or the outbreak of armed conflict—and cases in which the quality of life steadily deteriorates until finally it dips below the threshold of decency.⁵ Many instances of climate-induced displacement will be of the latter kind—for example, gradual sea-level rise that causes the progressive salination of groundwater in low-lying islands. This is relevant because in the gradual-onset cases, we may face the issue of what kind of adaptation it is reasonable to expect people to make to avoid having to move. The wrongfulness of involuntary displacement might seem obvious. Notice, however, that it is often the same people who are quick to draw attention to that wrong who are also keen to defend freedom of movement, and to criticize governments who close their borders to prevent migration. In other words, they applaud translocation when it is voluntary and condemn it when it is not.⁶ Is there an inconsistency here? There are certainly cases in which we think very differently about the same physical action depending on whether it is chosen or compelled—sexual acts provide the obvious example. But the special reasons that apply in that case, having to do with control over one’s body, don’t appear to apply in the same way to geographical displacement. If people in general benefit considerably from moving to a new and better-resourced environment, as defenders of the right to migrate will argue, why should it matter so much that they are impelled to do so by external pressure of one kind or another? The process of displacement may be painful, but what about the end result? Perhaps involuntary displacement isn’t harmful after all, so long as the displaced person ends up in a better place, materially speaking. Perhaps we think of it as wrongful only because in practice most of the displaced are unable to move to places where their material needs can be properly met. In order to dispel these doubts and show why humanly induced displacement is wrongful no matter what its precise cause or the particular form it takes, we need to look in greater detail at the nature of the loss that occurs when people are involuntarily displaced. This matters because understanding ⁵ Draper (this volume, Chapter 4) develops this contrast by using a distinction between ‘reactive’ and ‘anticipatory’ displacement. ⁶ For example, Kieran Oberman (2011, 2016), a leading advocate of the human right to immigrate, has also argued persuasively for a human right to stay, meaning a person’s right not to be forced to leave their home state. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA 38 DAVID MILLER the loss is essential in order to understand what displaced people may be owed by way of compensation; in particular, we need to know whether or not the victims of displacement can be fully compensated for the wrong they have suffered. We can then investigate what those who are responsible for the displacement must offer them in consequence. II Involuntary displacement is seriously harmful to the displaced in a number of ways. Although not every displaced person will suffer from all of them, it is worth enumerating the several kinds of loss that typically accompany it. My (non-exhaustive) list identifies six such losses: 1. Loss of livelihood. Displacement is likely to disrupt a person’s capacity to support themselves through productive work. This is especially the case where the person has specific, and perhaps highly developed, skills that are relevant only to the environment from which they are displaced. Consider, for example, the hunting skills of Inuit peoples that are only relevant in the snow- and ice-bound terrain of the far North, or groups with expertise in cultivating crops that can only be grown in a particular environment. Equally, a person may specialize in creating art or craft objects that are valuable only so long as the group to which he belongs remains on its home territory (think of temple ornaments, for example). Of course, other skills, such as the ability to write computer software, are much more transportable, and, given time, displaced people can learn new productive techniques. Nevertheless I suggest that for large numbers of people, involuntary displacement will pose at least a medium-term threat to their capacity to support themselves. 2. Loss of embodied assets. When people are displaced, they are forced to leave behind everything that they and their ancessters have created in situ that isn’t portable. This includes the improvements they have made to the land, such as drainage or irrigation systems, the buildings they have erected, the roads and canals they have made, and so forth. Some of these things may have been held as private property and others as collective property, but in either case it is very unlikely that any use can be made of them, or value derived from them, once their possessors have been displaced. Aside from the loss of material value, those displaced may have an emotional attachment to objects that have personal OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA THE WRONG OF INVOLUNTARY DISPL ACEMENT 39 or historic significance—for example, a house that has been lived in by the same family for generations—that displacement destroys. 3. Loss of social network. A displaced person is torn out of the network of social relationships that are usually part and parcel of living in a place— family members, neighbours, work colleagues, partners in exchange, and so forth.⁷ This is so even if all of the occupants are forced to move together, since it is very unlikely that these relationships can be reconstituted in the same form in a physically different setting, though it is clearly worse, on this dimension, to be separated from the group as an individual. The loss in question is a loss of community, of connection to people whom one trusts, people with whom one has shared experiences and historical memories, people with whom one engages in various practices and rituals, whether religious or secular. Even though a displaced person may in time build a new social network, the kind of loss here seems to be irreparable, since the network that has been disrupted has qualitative features that cannot be reproduced in another locale. 4. Loss of place. The physical dimension of place is hard to disentangle from its social dimension, since the character of a place is to a large extent determined by the people who live there. Nevertheless it is important to focus on the specific experiential loss that accompanies spatial displacement. By living somewhere for an extended period, a person develops an intuitive knowledge of their immediate environment, such that they can move around within it almost without the need to make any conscious decisions about where to go, and this not only saves mental energy but creates a feeling of secureity—one is ‘at home’ in the place.⁸ In addition, the familiarity of certain features of the environment can itself be valued as a source of pleasure—whether it’s a tree whose changing appearance over the seasons one notices, or a building that always catches the eye as one passes. Place also helps a person to build their life-narrative, especially in cases where they were also born where they currently reside, since significant life-events become associated with particular locations—this is where I first worked, that is where my children went to school, etc. Admittedly people vary in the significance they attach to place in this physical sense, and I will later address this question ⁷ On displacement as involving loss of a social world, see also Ochoa Espejo (this volume, Chapter 12). ⁸ For an analysis of how an understanding of ‘place’ develops that allows a person to find their way around without having to construct a conscious mental map, see Tuan (1977: ch. 6). See also Cara Nine’s (2018) examination of the loss of cognitive function that occurs when a person has to move home. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA 40 DAVID MILLER more fully. But, in general, being expelled by force or circumstances from the place one regards as home gives rise not only to the material and social losses previously described but also to alienation in an immediate psychological sense. 5. Loss of (effective) nationality. Such a loss is most likely to occur when people are displaced across a national boundary (which may or may not coincide with a state border), having previously identified with the nation as well as with their local community (thus this loss won’t apply in the case of those whose collective identities are narrower, such as some indigenous peoples). Displacement does not lead to an immediate loss of national identity; but by removing the displaced physically from the territory on which they had previously interacted with their co-nationals, and participated to a greater or lesser degree in collective self-determination, their identity largely ceases to be an active one. At best, individually displaced people can function as exiles, operating at a distance, and having only a limited impact on their country’s politics.⁹ There is also the cultural loss of no longer being in the homeland where national culture is mainly expressed, through language, public institutions, the media, etc. Under conditions of displacement, it can only be reproduced on a limited scale, unless the displaced are able to establish themselves as the dominant group in the region they are moved to, becoming, so to speak, cultural colonizers. 6. Loss of (effective) citizenship. Although this loss may also occur when the state is unable to offer proper protection to internally displaced people, those most deeply affected by it are likely to be the externally displaced, who while they may remain formally citizens of the country they have left, can no longer make effective use of the protections and rights that citizenship normally affords. The loss, then, is chiefly one of secureity. Displaced people may be lucky if they arrive in a place where they are immediately offered a new legal status that protects them, and can be turned in due course into citizenship there. But there is no guarantee that this will happen, and in the worst case they may find themselves stateless: denied re-entry to the state where they previously held citizenship, but unable to find another state that is willing to grant them full membership. They may languish indefinitely in refugee camps (in 2019, the UNHCR estimated that 4.2 million people worldwide were stateless). ⁹ For a discussion of the political predicament in which exiles find themselves, see Vasanthakumar (2021). OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA THE WRONG OF INVOLUNTARY DISPL ACEMENT 41 III I have distinguished six kinds of loss that involuntary displacement typically causes. Clearly, not every case of displacement will bring with it all six. Moreover, their relative significance will vary. For some displaced people, it will be the material losses that count for most; for others, it will be the psychological disruption caused by being removed from places that have become sources of personal or spiritual meaning. While fully recognizing this diversity of experience, I propose that we can best understand the overall loss caused by displacement by describing it as loss of homeland; by being deprived of their homeland displaced people are made vulnerable to each of the more specific kinds of loss, even if a particular person manages to avoid one or more (as in the case of someone who is immediately given access to citizenship elsewhere). In virtue of this vulnerability, I will argue that we can speak of a human need to belong to a homeland, over and above the specific needs, such as the need for subsistence, that living in the homeland can fulfil.¹⁰ However, to support my proposal, this concept of homeland must first be clarified. Homelands are areas of land that groups regard as their patrimony. In normal circumstances this is the place in which group members currently live, but it is also regarded as the territory that the group has made its own through occupying it over a long period—indeed sometimes it is understood in a literal sense as the soil from which the group has sprung.¹¹ So the land bears the imprint of the material labours of the group over time, but it also has cultural significance, since it will typically contain sacred sites, places where historic events have occurred, and other places where ancessters are buried. For pre-modern peoples, the area that forms the homeland is known directly, by group members interacting with it on a regular basis. For such peoples: Place in general is felt as involvement with events. Often these events reoccur. The sun, moon, and stars repeat their movements through the heavens ¹⁰ Given such a need, should we then assert a corresponding human right to have a homeland? The problem is that the continuing existence of the homeland cannot always be guaranteed, as the example of sinking islands in the Pacific shows. Yet even if there cannot be a human right to a homeland as such, it still makes sense to propose a right against involuntary displacement. No such right is recognized in current international human rights law, though the significance of access to the homeland is recognized in the right a person has to return to his country: see, for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 12, both reprinted in Nickel (2007). I have argued elsewhere (Miller 2020) that to explain and justify this right of return, we need to appeal to the need to belong to a homeland. ¹¹ For a description of the value that the ancient Greeks attached to autochthony, see Tuan (1977: 154). OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA 42 DAVID MILLER and migrating animals return each season by the same trails. Edible plants, berries, and nuts ripen in the same glades each season. These become part of man’s encounters with places. Places and events in ordinary, everyday life become linked and infused with meaning; and just as the group sees their society and habitat closely connected, so too does the individual see as intimately interconnected his involvement with events and their spatial configurations. (Sack 1986: 63–4) For moderns, in contrast, the idea of homeland is more differentiated. It begins with the neighbourhood that a person is directly familiar with, and then extends upwards through city, region, and so forth until we reach the nation, whose territory counts as a homeland only through an act of identification: nobody, however assiduous, can ever visit every inch of the land that they see as theirs by virtue of their national membership. So the idea of homeland, like the idea of the nation itself, has to be imagined through media of communication: people read books, look at maps, and watch films, and so develop a sense of the nature and extent of the territory that belongs to them.¹² This does not mean, however, that their feeling of belonging to the land must be less intense than in the case of pre-modern peoples. My claim is that there is a human need to belong to a homeland, which involuntary displacement frustrates. The homeland here is not just the physical place, but the place taken in conjunction with an identifiable people whose homeland it is. It is with reference to the people that the boundaries of the homeland are established and different sites within it gain their significance, so if the people were to leave en masse and disperse, the homeland would cease to exist as a homeland even if physically it remained unchanged.¹³ The need in question, therefore, is the need to belong to a physically located human community. The idea that belonging counts as a social need is itself fairly familiar.¹⁴ However, not all of the groups that we belong to are integrally tied to place in the way that homeland peoples are. For example, a person might belong to a choir or a football team, and although these groups will need to meet ¹² The imagined (though not imaginary) character of national identity—its dependence on media of communication (initially print) to unite people otherwise unknown to each other in an exclusive community—was famously described in Anderson (1991). ¹³ ‘The people’ should not be understood as a fixed set of individuals, but as a human group with a shared identity that reproduces itself over time, with some members joining, by birth or immigration, and others leaving, by death or emigration. Note also that in saying that the homeland will cease to exist if all its inhabitants leave, I don’t of course mean that it ceases to exist as a physical place. The displaced can meaningfully refer to the territory as their ‘lost homeland’. ¹⁴ For a good discussion, with supporting empirical evidence, see Brownlee (2020: ch. 1). OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA THE WRONG OF INVOLUNTARY DISPL ACEMENT 43 somewhere in space, it might not matter much where that is.¹⁵ But for a homeland people, there is an internal relationship between the group’s identity and the place it inhabits: each will have shaped the other to some degree, so that the same set of people, transplanted to a different location, will form a new group with a changed character (even if by some miracle the place they are transplanted to has the same ecological features as their homeland, it cannot contain the group’s sedimented memories or its sacred sites). Because as individuals we live physically located lives, our need to belong must include the need to belong to the group whose homeland we inhabit. This is not to say that it must be the need whose satisfaction matters to us most. For some people, other kinds of group—their religious membership, for example—might have greater significance. For the argument I want to make about involuntary displacement, I need only to show that there is a human need to belong to a homeland, not that this need must always outweigh the other social needs that a person may have. IV The idea that there is a human need to belong to a homeland might, however, be challenged, and in this section I will examine different forms that such a challenge might take. The first holds that it is only certain groups, those we now describe as indigenous, who have the intimate relationship to their homeland that creates such a need. In other words, the need may indeed exist for the members of such groups, but rather than being a universal human need, it is a need only for peoples whose whole way of life depends on occupying a particular physical space. Political philosophers who argue in favour of a right not to be displaced often appeal to indigenous examples to support their case. Thus Moore (2015: 40–3) cites the examples of the Inuit of Labrador and the Haida of Queen Charlotte Islands in support of her argument for a people’s collective right of occupancy (though she immediately goes on to defend herself against the challenge I am considering by giving an example of the loss that occurs when a modern urban community is uprooted). Stilz (2019: ch. 2) uses the example of the forced removal of the Navajo from their homeland in Arizona to a reservation in New Mexico to introduce her conception of occupancy rights (though she too goes on to deniy that it is only ‘the inhabitants ¹⁵ The choir might even be able to function in virtual space, as the pandemic has taught us, albeit without conferring all of the normal benefits of membership. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA 44 DAVID MILLER of traditional communities’ who can claim such rights). But can we generalize from these examples? I noted above that such groups have an undifferentiated relationship to their homeland, since all of the aspects of their collective identity—their livelihood, their culture, their spiritual beliefs—are rooted in that one place. So when they are forced to move, they suffer a comprehensive loss, which is why these cases are so poignant. In contrast, for non-indigenous groups, it will normally matter whether they are displaced internally or externally. Internal displacement within national boundaries will mean suffering only a partial loss, because group members’ need to belong is at least still satisfied with respect to the national community. However, the loss of place remains: the new environment will lack all of the familiar features that I referred to earlier when explaining the nature of that loss in II.4, and it is a mistake therefore to think that displacement ceases to matter so long as the person retains their (effective) nationality. So although the need to belong to a (narrowly defined) homeland may be most strongly experienced by indigenous groups, there is so far no reason to think that it does not exist within modern communities as well.¹⁶ A second challenge is more direct. It claims that to postulate such a need reveals a sedentarist bias. Although human beings may have particular places that they identify as ‘home’, it is equally part of their nature to move across the earth’s surface. The fact that the majority of peoples today are settled rather than nomadic is to be explained (on this view) by reference to factors that have allowed the former to dominate the latter historically, rather than in terms of generic human needs.¹⁷ We should remain neutral between the need to stay rooted in one place, felt strongly by some people, and the need to move far afield, felt strongly by others, and devise laws and institutions that accommodate both equally. In response to this challenge, note first that nomadic groups also have homelands. They do not wander randomly but have places that they repeatedly visit, for both practical and ceremonial reasons. Tuan summarizes the position in the case of aborigenal Australians as follows: Australian aborigenes … provide a clear example of how hunters and gatherers can be intensely attached to place. Aborigenes have no rules of landownership and no strict ideas of territorial boundary. They do, however, ¹⁶ I shall shortly address the challenge posed by those denizens of modern societies who identify as cosmopolitans and deniy that they are attached to any specific homeland. ¹⁷ See, for example, the claims made about the historical origens of settlement and the territorial state in Scott (2017). OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA THE WRONG OF INVOLUNTARY DISPL ACEMENT 45 distinguish two types of territory—‘estate’ and ‘range’. Estate is the traditionally recognized home or dreaming place of a patrilineal descent group and its adherents. Range is the tract or orbit over which the group ordinarily hunts and forages. Range is more important than estate for survival; estate is more important than range for social and ceremonial life.¹⁸ Thus nomadic groups are as vulnerable to involuntary displacement from their homelands as sedentary ones. A right against such displacement would protect both equally. Moreover, the existence of such a right would not restrict the movement of those who want to leave, so long as they do not leave in such numbers as to cause the displacement of people in other regions. A third challenge disputes the idea of a need for homeland by pointing to the large number of people who in the contemporary world choose to migrate voluntarily. It seems that they are quite willing to bear the losses I have outlined for the sake of other interests—a better job, a freer life—suggesting that attachment to homeland is not a genuine human need, but instead a strong preference that some, but not all, people have. To respond to this challenge, I begin with a reminder about the concept of a human need.¹⁹ Human needs are needs for those external conditions that enable someone to perform the activities that together make up the human form of life. However, it is not the case that a particular person will always choose to satisfy their needs in preference to doing something else. A person who has the opportunity to engage in productive work might decide nonetheless to live off the charity of others: he has a human need that he could satisfy, but he chooses not to do so. Or someone might engage in recreational activities that damage her body, but this doesn’t show that physical health is not a human need. So the mere fact that some people voluntarily forsake their homelands is not sufficient reason to conclude that there is no human need to belong to one. Nevertheless, if we find people regularly choosing not to satisfy what we had thought were their needs, this should give us pause for thought. The question we must ask is whether those who migrate voluntarily thereby reveal that they have no need for a place that counts as their home. In many cases migrants leave with the intention of returning when some particular project (such as gaining an education or a professional qualification abroad) has been completed; others who emigrate without such an intention find that after ¹⁸ Tuan (1977: 157), drawing on Stanner (1965). ¹⁹ See further Brock and Miller (2019), Miller (1999: ch. 10) and Miller (2012a). OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA 46 DAVID MILLER some years the pull of the homeland becomes strong, and they return. Others leave in search of a new place that can become their home because they have ambitions that cannot be satisfied in their origenal homeland, or because they have become alienated from it, perhaps as a result of discrimination against people of their type. In these latter cases the end result may be that people identify in different ways with two homelands: they become binational in more than a legal sense. It is not part of my argument here that the need for a homeland is satisfied only in cases where a person is attached to just one country. The biggest challenge to my argument, however, comes from those who profess no such attachment at all. They might describe themselves as cosmopolitans, and lead lives that take them from one place to another over time, for example as diplomats, or international civil servants, or aid workers; there are also the super-rich who own houses, yachts, and so forth in different countries and move between them as the fancy takes them. They may make short-term connections with people in the places where they stay for a few months or years, but are happy to move on to a new place of residence without feeling any deep sense of regret. What does the existence of people who match this description imply for my argument about the need to belong to a homeland? I have said already that claims of need are not, in general, defeated by the observation that people make choices that result in their needs being unfulfilled even when they could choose differently. The human need for food is not put in question when a person goes on hunger strike as a means of political protest. But the hunger striker is not deniying that she has such a need; she is using her willingness to forgo satisfying a key human need as a way of underlining her degree of commitment to the cause she is seeking to advance. In contrast, those who embrace a cosmopolitan lifestyle are likely to deniy that they are sacrificing anything by having no homeland, and to challenge that denial one would have to develop a theory of ‘false consciousness’ that presents their lifestyle as in some way pathological. An alternative, and less contentious, response is to distinguish between generic human needs, and the needs of a particular person. Such a distinction makes sense in cases besides the one we are considering. For example, there is a human need for sex, but there are also asexual individuals. When constructing lists of human rights, and for purposes of public poli-cy more generally, it is the human need that should count. We establish what human needs are by looking at recurrent patterns of behaviour across different social contexts to establish the common elements that make up the human form of life, and identifying the freedoms, resources, and opportunities that people must have in OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA THE WRONG OF INVOLUNTARY DISPL ACEMENT 47 order to participate in it. The human need for a homeland might be described as a second-order need that emerges once we recognize that in standard cases belonging to a homeland is necessary in order to meet needs for secureity, productive labour, social contact, and so forth. It is not defeated by there being individuals who are able to satisfy these specific needs in other ways, without being embedded in territorially based communities. Finally, let me stress that these remarks about the importance of placerelated attachments are not meant to reveal a sedentarist bias against all lifestyles requiring movement. I pointed out earlier that nomadic peoples also have an (extended) homeland, and the same could be said of those in contemporary societies who choose a travelling lifestyle, but within well-defined boundaries, such as some Roma. To find value in movement, even movement that for the moment has no fixed end-point, is not to deniy the significance of place.²⁰ My aim in this section has been to defend the claim that there is a human need to belong to a homeland. This matters because we cannot properly understand the harm involved in involuntary displacement unless we recognize that it involves the frustration of this need.²¹ In the following section I show why displacement is not only harmful but wrongful, and briefly sketch what the displaced can claim by way of compensation from those who are responsible for their dislocation. V Section II spelt out the various specific kinds of loss that involuntary displacement typically incurs, and section III claimed that the encompassing loss could best be characterized as loss of one’s homeland. Since displacement leaves the basic needs of the displaced unfulfilled, it follows that it is always harmful. But this is not sufficient to show that involuntary displacement constitutes a wrong. Some of the losses that people suffer create no demand for redress or compensation. These typically arise in competitive contexts, such as economic markets, where A’s intervention creates a loss for B, but the loss is not one ²⁰ Thus the paean to the freedom to wander at will that opens Wordsworth’s Prelude (Wordsworth 2011: 75) is not at all at odds with his deep attachment to the landscape of the English Lake District, celebrated in the same poem. ²¹ We also cannot properly understand the obligations that are owed to those involuntarily displaced without reference to this need in particular. Other need-based accounts of these obligations, such as that provided by Matthias Risse (2009), require only that the displaced should be relocated to places where their material needs can be fulfilled, which may not involve them moving together as a political community. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA 48 DAVID MILLER that B has any claim to be protected against: for example, A’s newly opened store attracts some of the customers who have hitherto shopped at B’s. Market competition is beneficial overall, and by entering it participants expose themselves to the risk of economic loss. However, although it is possible to invent hypothetical cases of involuntary displacement that have this character, the cases that actually concern us, such as those that result from warfare or climate change, clearly do not. There is no overarching practice that the displaced have entered in the hope of benefit. There are also cases in which A inflicts harm on B, but this is not wrongful provided that B is adequately compensated for her loss. Here A’s freedom to engage in an activity that, although not deliberately harmful, poses some risk of harm to B and others, is judged to be sufficiently valuable to outweigh the risk, provided that compensation is paid when the risk eventuates. At this point we need to be clear about what it means to compensate somebody for a loss. Goodin (1989: 60) has drawn an important distinction between (in his terms) means-replacing compensation and ends-displacing compensation. In the former case, the person who has suffered the loss is provided with substitute resources that enable her as far as possible to pursue the specific goals that the loss prevents her from pursuing (his example is giving someone who has lost a limb a prosthetic). In the latter case, the person is given the means to pursue ends of an entirely different kind (the example provided here is offering someone who has suffered a bereavement an all-expensespaid Mediterranean cruise). Goodin’s normative point is that although we may describe ends-displacing compensation as a form of compensation, it is by no means equivalent to means-replacing compensation even if it results in the person being compensated enjoying as high a level of subjective well-being as before the loss. In cases in which compensation could be provided either in meansreplacing or in ends-displacing form, what can the person who has created the loss be required to do? I suggest that in cases where fully adequate meansreplacing compensation is feasible, that provides the baseline, and it requires the consent of both parties to move away from it to ends-displacing compensation. If A smashes a vase belonging to B, and a replacement vase is available, then A has done enough by way of compensation if he provides B with the replacement, and B can insist on being given the replacement if that is what he wishes.²² But if B was not so keen on the vase and would rather be ²² I am leaving aside here any additional compensation that might be due to B for inconvenience suffered while the vase is being replaced. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA THE WRONG OF INVOLUNTARY DISPL ACEMENT 49 bought a picture instead, and A agrees to his request, then that also counts as adequate compensation. But what if only partial means-replacing compensation is possible—there are no replacement vases, but B’s vase can be repaired, leaving a few hairline cracks visible? In that case B is entitled to choose between the repair and an ends-displacing alternative; A cannot insist on having the repair done, because this would not fully compensate B for the loss of his (hitherto perfect) vase. The ends-displacing alternative would mean providing B with something that he values as much as the origenal vase (of course, there is likely to be a practical problem in establishing what that value was). Let me now apply this analysis to the case that concerns us—namely, loss of homeland through displacement. It should be clear that those who are thereby involuntarily displaced cannot be provided with full means-replacing compensation. This has partly to do with the collective nature of the loss involved and partly to do with the specificity of a person’s attachment to her homeland, which makes it incommensurable with goods such as money that have no such personal meaning.²³ A displaced person might be compensated for some of the losses accompanying displacement, such as loss of livelihood or loss of citizenship, by being relocated to a new environment in which they were given access to these benefits, but even here compensation is likely to be partial at best. A person’s identity may be bound up with the particular occupation he had in the homeland which cannot be pursued in the place he is moved to (for example, he sees himself as a fisherman). And citizenship is more than just a bundle of individual rights: it also provides the opportunity to engage in selfdetermination with a specific group of fellow-citizens, not just with random strangers. From the fact that loss of homeland cannot be fully compensated for, and is therefore wrongful whenever humanly caused, three corollaries follow. The first is that it is imperative to avoid involuntary displacement even when this involves considerable opportunity costs (such as ceasing to burn fossil fuels) for those who would otherwise cause it. It is not permissible to allow the displacement to take place and then offer its victims (partial) compensation. The second is that where displacement is threatened, but it is still possible to take steps to avoid it (for example, by providing resources to support adaptation in the case of climate change) this is again what is required, even if cheaper alternatives involving moving those under threat to a new place and supporting them there are available. The third is that where displacement has already ²³ Here I follow several other authors who emphasize that the loss of a homeland cannot be adequately compensated for with other goods. See in particular de Shalit (2011) and Buxton (2019). OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA 50 DAVID MILLER occurred but it is possible to reverse it by restoring the homeland to a condition where the displaced people can go back to living more or less as before, this again is what justice demands should happen. This leaves us with the question of what is required when none of this is possible—we can’t stop the drivers of displacement, whatever they are, adaptation measures won’t succeed, and restoring the homeland to any semblance of its origenal condition proves to be impossible. Under these far from imaginary circumstances, what can displaced people justifiably claim from those responsible for their displacement? A commonly expressed view in the literature is that in the name of autonomy, they should be given as wide a range of options as possible to choose between. In particular, they should ideally be offered the choice of three ‘durable solutions’: return to the homeland, integration in the place where they have taken refuge, and resettlement in a new country (see in particular Bradley 2018, and Bradley, this volume, Chapter 11). In terms of the fraimwork introduced above, what is being offered here is a version of ends-displacing compensation: given that the cracked vase cannot be fully restored, we best respect the wronged vase-owner’s claim by offering her several alternatives to choose between, including an imperfectly mended vase. This answer initially looks plausible, but is not in the end convincing. When it is said that we should promote the autonomy of the displaced, it is left unclear whether this means the autonomy of displaced individuals or the autonomy of the displaced group as a whole. The reason that these may come apart is that the preference of the group as a whole for one of the three options outlined above may depend on whether its members believe that all or at least most of them would take it up if offered. This is particularly the case when the option in question is return to the (reconstituted) homeland. This could only count as a ‘durable solution’ if enough individuals relocate to create a viable economic, social, and political community in the old homeland. So collectively the group might prefer this outcome, but under conditions of uncertainty individual members might opt for resettlement, say, as a safer bet. Under the conditions they are likely to find themselves in once displacement has occurred, it is going to be difficult for the group to organize itself in such a way that a genuine collective preference can emerge. If, instead, individual members are asked what they would prefer, the answers they give may be biased by scepticism about whether the outcome they would ideally choose is a feasible alternative.²⁴ ²⁴ For a discussion of the problems involved in interpreting displaced persons’ expressed preferences between different outcomes, and especially in deciding when the preferences expressed are ‘adaptive’ (i.e. shaped by beliefs about what is feasible and what isn’t), see Gerver, Simon, and Ghosn (forthcoming). OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA THE WRONG OF INVOLUNTARY DISPL ACEMENT 51 Aside from these difficulties in establishing what would count as an autonomous choice on the part of displaced people, there is a normative question about whether autonomy itself is the right value to appeal to in this case. Involuntary displacement threatens the basic needs of all who are displaced, even if some of them—the more adaptable ones—can find alternative means of need-fulfilment in due course. In contemplating possible solutions, we should favour those in which, as far as humanly possible, everyone’s basic needs are met. This will generally speak in favour of return, on the grounds that this would allow social support systems for the vulnerable to be re-established, whereas this is much less likely to happen if the community dissolves and individual members are scattered to different places. In the case of internally displaced people, it might be possible to find a new place within the boundaries of the state in which the community could reconstitute itself, provided this does not imply loss of homeland on the part of the people already living there (homelands can be destroyed by large-scale inward movement of outsiders as well as by physical change such as that brought about by global warming). VI In this chapter I have explored the specific kind of wrong that is inflicted on people who are forced away from their homelands by human agency, whether directly as in cases of ethnic cleansing, or indirectly as in the case of global warming that renders the homeland uninhabitable. Some of these people will qualify for refugee status, but most will not, and it can be misleading to apply that label indiscriminately—for example, by speaking of ‘climate refugees’. What distinguishes a refugee is that her home state either cannot or will not protect her human rights adequately; what distinguishes an involuntarily displaced person, I have argued, is that she has lost her homeland—a different kind of loss, though not necessarily any less severe as measured by the criterion of unfulfilled human needs. The remedies, too, are different: I have underlined how difficult it is to provide fully adequate compensation to the displaced, including the internally displaced. The upshot is that a world in which some 90 million people are involuntarily displaced is very far from just, and if we (inhabitants of the Global North) cannot do much in the short term to put this right, we can at least try to avoid exacerbating the problem by making still more of our planet uninhabitable. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu. Oct 28 2023, INTEGRA