ow many imagined futures are projected onto the world's borders, walls, and seas? Above the treacherous waters of the English Channel. Above the fences dividing Europe from Africa and the Middle East. Above the checkpoints that have come to symbolize our time. In Europe and North America, migration has become one of the most politically contentious issues of our age.
Elsewhere, in Afghanistan, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and countless other places, millions reach towards futures beyond the confines of their present lives. They seek safety, stability, opportunity, dignity, and the chance to plan for tomorrow.
Most will never cross a border. That is the paradox. This single fact undercuts the distorted rhetoric of our time: the "swarms," the "invasions," the strident talk of unprecedented movement. That rhetoric now spans the political spectrum from left to right, uniting erstwhile opponents in a single anxious fiction: that the world is on the move as never before. It is not. The vast majority of displaced people remain within their own countries or in neighboring states. The crisis is not too much movement. It is too little recognition of those who cannot move.
The lives of those left behind expose a deeper crisis of recognition. We understand displacement primarily through movement: border crossings, sea journeys, arrivals, deterrence, deportation, and return. Displacement only becomes politically legible when people move. However, this creates a critical blind spot. The same forces that propel some across borders strand others in place. War, persecution, climate change, and political exclusion leave many suspended, neither secure nor mobile. The result is a new geography of exile.
Running through these diverse crises is a shared experience of dispossession without departure. Communities fragment. Livelihoods disappear. Educational pathways collapse. Everyday life is dismantled. So too are security, participation, and self–determination.
The argument also unsettles the lexicon through which displacement is conventionally understood: refugee and migrant, displaced and non–displaced. The realities of displacement are lived in the spaces between, through trajectories marked by movement, waiting, interruption, return, and uncertainty. Immobility is not simply the absence of movement. It is often an integral component of the migration pathway. Binary terminology obscures more than it reveals, flattening the textured realities of those who live between categories, across borders, and within protracted insecurity. Movement and stasis are not opposites but conditions that coexist, overlap, and transform one another over time. Nadera Shalhoub–Kevorkian calls this condition "exile at home," a phrase that captures a reality that frequently evades recognition. This kind of exclusion does not expel people from their countries but from meaningful participation in them. As educational, professional, and civic opportunities dissolve, the exiled become invisible within the societies they inhabit: physically present but politically absent. Specters within their own homelands.
The visual grammar of refugee politics is centered on movement. We recognize border crossings and sea journeys. Far harder to see are the quieter forms of displacement that occur in situ: knowledge systems dismantled, careers interrupted, institutions hollowed out, generations watching hope recede. Their exile is measured not in miles traveled but in futures denied.
Why does this matter? Because our fixation on movement leads us to repeatedly misidentify where the greatest risks lie. Humanitarian systems were designed for sudden emergencies. Refugee protection activates only at border crossings. But today's crises are neither temporary nor defined primarily by movement. They are prolonged conditions of exclusion, insecurity, and institutional erosion. And at precisely the moment such crises demand sustained engagement, international support is contracting. Humanitarian resources are under severe strain.
The failure to take immobility seriously reflects a broader malaise. Political attention is directed towards managing immediate pressures rather than addressing the conditions that produce them. Refugee protection is supplanted by deterrence and a desire for containment. Long–term commitments are replaced by myopic management. The geography of European protection ends at the Mediterranean's edge. What lies beyond is not asylum but interception. Meanwhile, development aid was once evaluated by the number of schools built and vaccines delivered. Now it is more often calculated in bodies stopped and boats turned back.
But abandonment accumulates. Educational exclusion, institutional erosion, and futures denied rarely remain isolated problems. Over time, they generate wider social, political, and economic consequences that extend well beyond the communities initially affected.
Afghanistan offers a particularly stark illustration. As the Taliban regime enters its sixth year, millions of young women are banned from secondary and higher education and from most forms of employment. The consequences of gender apartheid are gauged not only in rights denied but in futures foreclosed. This is not a temporary interruption but the systematic destruction of educational, professional, and civic participation on a generational scale.
In the Remote Learning in Crises and Emergencies Programme at the University of Cambridge, my 19–year–old mentee from Herat told me: "I'm not moving anywhere, but I'm not becoming who I could be. I'm rotting at home." That is exile without movement.
Afghanistan is not unique. Similar dynamics unfold in Gaza, where an entire cohort of children has lost years of schooling, and in Sudan, where universities have been devastated or repurposed for military use. Nor are these outcomes confined to the communities in which they originate. Educational systems lose expertise. Economic opportunities contract. Political grievances deepen. Prolonged exclusion incubates criminal networks and armed groups. Most people respond to exclusion with resilience rather than violence. Yet political abandonment rarely remains siloed. Instead, it spirals.
We are living through a period of profound technological transformation in which knowledge has become one of the most important sources of economic and political power. Exclusion from education and professional life does not simply reproduce existing inequalities; it amplifies them. As some societies accelerate through advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and digital infrastructure, others risk becoming progressively disconnected from the systems shaping the future.
So, what would it mean to take immobility seriously? It would mean expanding refugee protection beyond border crossing as the sole trigger for recognition. It would mean funding education, livelihoods, and institutional renewal in places where people are caught, not simply providing humanitarian relief to those who have moved. Crucially, it would mean accepting that better conditions often enable, rather than eliminate, migration. The goal, therefore, cannot be to make people stay, but to ensure they are not forced to flee. This requires moving beyond coercive conditionality, aid weaponized to compel cooperation on returns, towards genuine partnerships. Development funding should support governance, public services, effective anti–corruption measures, and long–term institutional renewal, not short–term border control. Legal pathways must expand to include resettlement, family reunification, humanitarian visas, and labor mobility agreements that recognize migration as a legitimate strategy rather than a policy failure. Most importantly, taking immobility seriously means recognizing that preventing forced displacement is not an alternative to responding to it. It is the same obligation.
The challenge, therefore, is not only recognizing suffering. It is recognizing risk.
Some of the most urgent displacement crises of our time are unfolding behind the border: in brilliant young women denied the right to learn, in hollowed institutions, in futures systematically stripped away. The future geography of displacement will be defined as much by those who cannot leave as by those who do.
a global affairs media network
The new geography of exile
Photo by Hamid Samanian on Unsplash.
June 20, 2026
Most displaced people never cross a border, and that’s a trend that will only increase. Yet our systems ignore those trapped in place by war and persecution, writes Marissa Quie.
H
ow many imagined futures are projected onto the world's borders, walls, and seas? Above the treacherous waters of the English Channel. Above the fences dividing Europe from Africa and the Middle East. Above the checkpoints that have come to symbolize our time. In Europe and North America, migration has become one of the most politically contentious issues of our age.
Elsewhere, in Afghanistan, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and countless other places, millions reach towards futures beyond the confines of their present lives. They seek safety, stability, opportunity, dignity, and the chance to plan for tomorrow.
Most will never cross a border. That is the paradox. This single fact undercuts the distorted rhetoric of our time: the "swarms," the "invasions," the strident talk of unprecedented movement. That rhetoric now spans the political spectrum from left to right, uniting erstwhile opponents in a single anxious fiction: that the world is on the move as never before. It is not. The vast majority of displaced people remain within their own countries or in neighboring states. The crisis is not too much movement. It is too little recognition of those who cannot move.
The lives of those left behind expose a deeper crisis of recognition. We understand displacement primarily through movement: border crossings, sea journeys, arrivals, deterrence, deportation, and return. Displacement only becomes politically legible when people move. However, this creates a critical blind spot. The same forces that propel some across borders strand others in place. War, persecution, climate change, and political exclusion leave many suspended, neither secure nor mobile. The result is a new geography of exile.
Running through these diverse crises is a shared experience of dispossession without departure. Communities fragment. Livelihoods disappear. Educational pathways collapse. Everyday life is dismantled. So too are security, participation, and self–determination.
The argument also unsettles the lexicon through which displacement is conventionally understood: refugee and migrant, displaced and non–displaced. The realities of displacement are lived in the spaces between, through trajectories marked by movement, waiting, interruption, return, and uncertainty. Immobility is not simply the absence of movement. It is often an integral component of the migration pathway. Binary terminology obscures more than it reveals, flattening the textured realities of those who live between categories, across borders, and within protracted insecurity. Movement and stasis are not opposites but conditions that coexist, overlap, and transform one another over time. Nadera Shalhoub–Kevorkian calls this condition "exile at home," a phrase that captures a reality that frequently evades recognition. This kind of exclusion does not expel people from their countries but from meaningful participation in them. As educational, professional, and civic opportunities dissolve, the exiled become invisible within the societies they inhabit: physically present but politically absent. Specters within their own homelands.
The visual grammar of refugee politics is centered on movement. We recognize border crossings and sea journeys. Far harder to see are the quieter forms of displacement that occur in situ: knowledge systems dismantled, careers interrupted, institutions hollowed out, generations watching hope recede. Their exile is measured not in miles traveled but in futures denied.
Why does this matter? Because our fixation on movement leads us to repeatedly misidentify where the greatest risks lie. Humanitarian systems were designed for sudden emergencies. Refugee protection activates only at border crossings. But today's crises are neither temporary nor defined primarily by movement. They are prolonged conditions of exclusion, insecurity, and institutional erosion. And at precisely the moment such crises demand sustained engagement, international support is contracting. Humanitarian resources are under severe strain.
The failure to take immobility seriously reflects a broader malaise. Political attention is directed towards managing immediate pressures rather than addressing the conditions that produce them. Refugee protection is supplanted by deterrence and a desire for containment. Long–term commitments are replaced by myopic management. The geography of European protection ends at the Mediterranean's edge. What lies beyond is not asylum but interception. Meanwhile, development aid was once evaluated by the number of schools built and vaccines delivered. Now it is more often calculated in bodies stopped and boats turned back.
But abandonment accumulates. Educational exclusion, institutional erosion, and futures denied rarely remain isolated problems. Over time, they generate wider social, political, and economic consequences that extend well beyond the communities initially affected.
Afghanistan offers a particularly stark illustration. As the Taliban regime enters its sixth year, millions of young women are banned from secondary and higher education and from most forms of employment. The consequences of gender apartheid are gauged not only in rights denied but in futures foreclosed. This is not a temporary interruption but the systematic destruction of educational, professional, and civic participation on a generational scale.
In the Remote Learning in Crises and Emergencies Programme at the University of Cambridge, my 19–year–old mentee from Herat told me: "I'm not moving anywhere, but I'm not becoming who I could be. I'm rotting at home." That is exile without movement.
Afghanistan is not unique. Similar dynamics unfold in Gaza, where an entire cohort of children has lost years of schooling, and in Sudan, where universities have been devastated or repurposed for military use. Nor are these outcomes confined to the communities in which they originate. Educational systems lose expertise. Economic opportunities contract. Political grievances deepen. Prolonged exclusion incubates criminal networks and armed groups. Most people respond to exclusion with resilience rather than violence. Yet political abandonment rarely remains siloed. Instead, it spirals.
We are living through a period of profound technological transformation in which knowledge has become one of the most important sources of economic and political power. Exclusion from education and professional life does not simply reproduce existing inequalities; it amplifies them. As some societies accelerate through advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and digital infrastructure, others risk becoming progressively disconnected from the systems shaping the future.
So, what would it mean to take immobility seriously? It would mean expanding refugee protection beyond border crossing as the sole trigger for recognition. It would mean funding education, livelihoods, and institutional renewal in places where people are caught, not simply providing humanitarian relief to those who have moved. Crucially, it would mean accepting that better conditions often enable, rather than eliminate, migration. The goal, therefore, cannot be to make people stay, but to ensure they are not forced to flee. This requires moving beyond coercive conditionality, aid weaponized to compel cooperation on returns, towards genuine partnerships. Development funding should support governance, public services, effective anti–corruption measures, and long–term institutional renewal, not short–term border control. Legal pathways must expand to include resettlement, family reunification, humanitarian visas, and labor mobility agreements that recognize migration as a legitimate strategy rather than a policy failure. Most importantly, taking immobility seriously means recognizing that preventing forced displacement is not an alternative to responding to it. It is the same obligation.
The challenge, therefore, is not only recognizing suffering. It is recognizing risk.
Some of the most urgent displacement crises of our time are unfolding behind the border: in brilliant young women denied the right to learn, in hollowed institutions, in futures systematically stripped away. The future geography of displacement will be defined as much by those who cannot leave as by those who do.
