A Fifth World? Displaced Persons and Peoples
The four worlds came into our vocabulary gradually over the past generation—first the three categories of countries and finally, circa 1974, the fourth world of indigenous ethnic minority peoples.
Very tentatively, a few writers have ventured to extend this inventory to five, but inconsistently and without persevering. Given George A. Miller's familiar algorithm, “The magical number seven, plus-or-minus two” (1956), cognitively, we could handle going above four worlds, and for convenience more than conviction, I will do so here.One can document kinds and degrees of violence in the other worlds, but, in addition, each of those worlds contributes to the fifth, which I will simply call displaced persons and peoples, who may continue to affiliate with some other world or worlds at the same time. The Nuer refugees studied in the U.S. Midwest by Holtzman (chapter VII) are people from the fourth world, immigrating from the third world to live in the first world, but as fifth-world refugees. Persons and populations are more difficult to describe when they and their ideas move about freely, willingly or otherwise. Furthermore, some cultural groups pre-date the jigsaw puzzle of nation-states, and are not displaced but have been rendered asunder by the cuts of history and/or their own peregrinations, such as Jews, Gypsies, Kurds, and even Saami.
The first world absorbs, at least temporarily, displaced groups coming from the third and second worlds. But the first and second worlds together have precipitated more displaced individual persons than the third and fourth worlds—despite or because of their sometimes relative affluence. These are the homeless, literally or figuratively extruded from their first-world or second-world family, community, job, society. A lesser number of homeless are just psychologically isolated, still living with their families, whom they cannot support or properly face.
Some homeless claim they have chosen this way of life; others clearly did not. While structural violence is implicated in their displacement, direct violence may have also played a role. Once displaced, there follow more indignities and violence.Displaced individuals in a third-world setting will not have the wealth of discard to harvest that is especially available along the alleys of the first world. In the fourth world, displaced individuals may be absorbed by their overarching first-, second-, or third-world country, because their own small-scale society may have no roles of last resort for them. There have been roles and stereotypes for the displaced in nation-states for some time; the problem is not novel, but its intensity is.
Some displaced individuals make radical relocations to another cultural setting, again, voluntarily or unvoluntarily; sometimes dramatic transnational moves involve whole families and much larger groupings (Warshall 2002). When this happens, emigration and immigration records may yield statistics, if translocations are legal; otherwise the extent of these global flows of population is as untabulated as those of the individual homeless. In the case of centrifugal exodus, whether voluntary or involuntary, violence is one element people would like to leave behind. In the case of centripetal flows, violence also plays a role in rendering the unknown so plausibly better than the intolerable familiar, that migrants give new settings the benefit of the doubt.
Throughout history and prehistory, where there have been migrations, there have been back-migrations, and these can sometimes be tallied. In 2000, 600,000 refugees voluntarily returned “home,” of the perhaps 22 million displaced transnationally from 120 countries (UNHCR 2000). A less certain but equal number of persons has been displaced as groups within their nation-states, due to ethnic and religious strife, famine, natural disasters, and, ironically, development projects.
In 2000, about 15 million refugees could not return home because of anticipated persecution or death. Sometimes persons and groups become expelled from host countries—77,000 in a recent year—to face violence in their home countries. “If one can speak to the moral heart of the world, those violently forced to flight may be the most accurate signal of planetary human cruelty.. (Warshall 2002: 40-42).As has been the case with natural ecosystems, interference in these natural cultural systems can backfire. Any well-meant adjustment may have an infinity of unintended and deleterious consequences, accompanying or not accompanying the intended beneficial one. Some general conclusions can be gleaned from experience, some being hardly surprising. Armed conflict seems ludicrous as a solution to anything, and spews animosities and landmines without so much as a half-life. Food aid appears to benefit corporately-connected donors at one end, and intercepting vandals on the other, more than the actual population at risk. Humanitarian aid in general amplifies local and transnational dislocations, installing codependencies and intensifying inequities with irreversible consequences. Finally, the restructuring of “free trade” has added stress to the system, at all levels.