Forced displacement and internal migration in Colombia, 1992-2004

This document deconstructs the issue of forced displacement in Colombia, focusing on the period 1992 – 2004, and has two main methodological features. The first is its interdisciplinary approach, which is both sociological and economic. The second is its multilevel orientation, which aims to tackle forced displacement in Colombia on the individual, community and aggregate levels. Given the lack of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to forced migration, I propose a new one, based on bounded rationality from economic theory and using Castles (2003) and Richmond (1988) for the sociology of forced migration. In order to properly characterise the concept of forced displacement as one of the many modalities of migration, my literature review expands on the thesis’ remit, both in time and scope, including studies of internal migration in Colombia, between 1960 and 2004. The review reveals some interesting lacunas and regularities in the study of forced migration in Colombia: the lack of interdisciplinary studies, the lack of consensus about the real dimension of forced displacement in Colombia - as a consequence of the divergent and hence unreliable nature of current statistics - the historic role of violence for flows of migration in Colombia, the importance of land appropriation and illegal economic activities as catalysts for the decision to migrate, and the specific profiles of gender and ethnic backgrounds. These issues are addressed in three chapters: one concentrates on deconstructing the different statistics available for forced displacement in Colombia, the systems devoted to collect them and the subjective reasons that may explain the differences between them: another evaluates the recurrence of specific patterns of ethnic background and gender among a displaced community and the third evaluates he lack of social cohesion as anomie, through applying the scale of Srole (1956) as used by Lipman and Havens (1965) in their study of the anomie among displaced people in Colombia