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How do war, conflict, and insecurity shape, disrupt, and transform mobility trajectories and patterns of translocal life—within countries and across borders? This introduction foregrounds the book's overarching research question and provides a brief synopsis of how scholars in Migration and Refugee Studies, as well as in Peace and Conflict Studies, have addressed translocal lives in times of conflict. Conceptually, we argue for a shift from a transnational to a translocal research perspective—which we conceive of as a people-centred, socially situated, and place-based variant of transnationalism—for two reasons. First, we contend that this perspective offers a more adequate framework for understanding people's complex mobility trajectories, practices, and social ties, which not only span borders but also connect lives within and across distinct places amidst violent conflicts. Second, we argue that focusing on translocal social fields, understood here as multi-layered webs of social relations stretching across multiple places and often territorial and scalar boundaries, and on their transformations under conditions of violence and war, provides an appropriate strategy for engaging with the critique of approaches shaped by methodological nationalism in both fields of study. After outlining distinct translocal constellations shaped by violent conflict, this introduction also sets out the structure of the book and its empirical contributions.

Read the book chapter here.