International, partition, security, and homelessness:

Why is the question of ‘home’ important in a time when the world today is rife with mobility?
Forced, fractured, aspirational, uncontained, multiplicitious movement. When the question of
belongingness is only mediated through dislocation and displacement. I propose that to talk of home
is especially relevant now because the sentiment that arbitrates imaginations of home is not one of
disappearance or irrelevance but absence felt through a desire for return. A desire for ground and
grounding in relation to an inter-national that in the ‘now’ only offers homelessness. the sense of
home has collapsed into discontinuities ordered by sentiments of “refuge and terror”. The
temporality of return that structures the stability of home has dispersed into disjunctive courses,
commanding at one time longing and nostalgia and at others a virulent dissociation. As the
performance of home is pursued by demands of nation and community, the crack between the two
opens on to the homelessness of the international. Homelessness is the experiential condition of
international politics, situated ‘in-between’ the ceaseless contest of desires of belonging and
owning.

As the chief protagonist of this homelessness, the figure of refugee is inextricably entwined with
practices of security and the organizing principle of security today, which is partition. Partition has
been termed as the organizational basis for the politics of the international and the founding logic of
the modern nation-state system. partition becomes necessary to the logic of delimiting sovereignty
and organizing the dispersal of power, mapping territorial organization on peoples with ‘singular
destinies’. As the moment of division, it projects the nation into the system of global modernity. The
field and politics of international is continuously infolding into the partitions that situate it,
percolating into every day experience through the modalities of these separations. Constitutive of
the originary moment, partition inaugurates the international via necessary separation, to carve out
the limits of the nation on territory, mapped sociologically through difference and separateness. The
divisional ontology of the politics of partition produces bodies and communities whose notions of
home, homeland, and nation stand altered to refuge, displacement, and homelessness. When
stipulated as static and once-and for-all, partition and the borders it engender render these bodies
as excess. However, as the event of emergence of the international, partition remains always
unfinished, and thus the production of bodies, and the enunciations of the limits of international
abjection and subjection, is a function of this event and its return.

As its originary and necessary event then partition engenders the international itself as the everyday
return of the unhomely. That is, as its first movement and enduring basis, partition renders the
international as its effect, bringing to bear the territorial divisions it casts on politics and among
peoples. However, as a function and demand of this politics, partition becomes the event that
answers to the strangeness of displaced emplacement within the international. As such, partition
itself becomes the effect of this politics, demarcating terms of relationality with the ‘self’ as much as
the ‘other’, often blurring the distinction between them. This seismic tension and circularity
between event and effect conflates the partition and the international, producing everyday
discourses within this politics of location, home, belonging, and return.