52 Crisis FMR 45 February 2014 Populations ‘trapped’ at times of crisis Richard Black and Michael Collyer A focus on those who are trapped challenges both theoretical and practical approaches to mobility and crisis, which prioritise movement. Those who have lost control of the decision to move away from potential danger have inevitably lost a lot more too. There are obvious humanitarian reasons to be concerned about situations in which individuals are unable to move to escape danger. Such immobility magnifes their vulnerability and may inhibit the access of humanitarian actors. There is also a growing weight of evidence that particular drivers, such as environmental change, may actually prevent rather than encourage movement. To be ‘trapped’, individuals must not only lack the ability to move but also either want or need to move. The ability to migrate is clearly a complex and multifaceted indicator that includes a range of potentially relevant policies that may impede movement and access to signifcant resources. A consideration of trapped populations must distinguish between ability, desire and need to move. The theoretical problem of distinguishing between not wanting and not being able to migrate and the possibility of involuntary immobility, that is, distinguishing those who wish to move (or need to do so in times of crisis) but remain in situ from those who do not wish to move, is likely to be extremely difcult, not least because people’s judgement about whether it is necessary to move is likely to change over even quite short periods of time. A nuanced reframing of migration theory around the three concepts of migratory space, local assets and cumulative causation is undoubtedly a step forward in explaining the full range of mobility decisions. 1 The justifcation for a concern with the immobile is that particularly vulnerable populations will be trapped. Yet the potentially extreme vulnerability of the involuntarily immobile justifes greater atention to this group anyway. It also justifes some atempt to extrapolate existing information to gain some understanding of how those who are trapped might respond to progressively more severe crises or shocks and how these responses could be supported. Confict is one factor which may disrupt existing paterns of mobility and prevent further migration taking place. For example, it could be argued in relation to conficts in the 1990s in Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Somalia and elsewhere that those in most humanitarian need were precisely those unable to fee from confict and violence, rather than those who moved to become refugees or IDPs. Recognising this, international actors sought to establish ‘safe havens’ within these countries, where both in situ and internally displaced populations could beneft from UN protection and assistance, although in practice these zones did not always remain ‘safe’, as was illustrated most notoriously in the town of Srebenica. A consistent focus on movement “renders the involuntarily immobilised invisible”. Lubkemann considers the situation in a drought-prone rural area of Mozambique during the civil war where a predominantly male group with established paterns of labour migration to neighbouring South Africa was able to beneft economically from forced migration, whereas members of the disproportionately female group lef behind were prevented – by the intensifcation of violence – from engaging in their usual small-scale mobility in response to the prolonged drought of the early 1980s and so their impoverishment increased. Those who moved the least ultimately sufered most dramatically from the war’s efects on migration precisely because their