Epilogue: Reflections on Belonging, Otherness and the Possibilities of Friendship

In migration and refugee studies, belonging has long been equated with the territorial space of the country of origin as home. Malkki (1995) links this so-called sedentarist bias to the claim that we live in an era of ‘the national order of things’ in which ‘rootedness’ in culture and a geographic territory is considered to be the natural and normal feature of humanity. In her pioneering work, she disputes this territorial approach of home in refugee studies by deterritorializing it.

To automatically consider the country of origin as ‘home’ also assumes ‘that refugees’ attachment to their homeland and their desire to return to it are ‘natural’ givens’ (Al-Rasheed, 1994, p. 199). In Al-Rasheed’s research on two refugee groups in England (Iraqi Assyrians and Iraqi Arabs), she shows how their past experiences and their relationships with their country of origin are essential to the way the concepts of home and return are understood. She comments on the predominance of the myth of return among the Iraqi Arabs and its absence among the Assyrian ethnoreligious minority from Iraq (Al-Rasheed, 1994, p. 217). This comparison shows that belonging and home do not have the same meaning to all people from the same country of origin. Thus, the position in terms of belonging of individuals or groups who have experienced othering (because of their gender, age, ethnicity, race or sexuality) in their country of birth is much more complicated than is often assumed. To grasp this complexity we need a non-sedentarist approach that enables a broader lens for viewing different sources and locations of belonging (see also Ghorashi, 2017). From a nonsedentary point of view, belonging is deterritorialized and reterritorialized through the particular positionings by which different practices, spaces and biographical stories overlap. Belonging is about the embodied, imagined and narrated ways that ‘processes of place making meet the changing global economic and political conditions of lived spaces – the relation, we could say, between place and space’ (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997, pp. 39–40).