Fast and slow violence and the survival work of the stateless: The case of the Vietnamese in Cambodia

Abstract

Drawing on qualitative research this article argues that a feminist lens on violence offers a framework to advance scholarship on statelessness. Conceptually, it analyses the fast and slow violence of statelessness, the conditions that enable it, and the ‘survival work’ it produces. Such conceptualisations have not yet entered the vernacular of statelessness scholarship. In treating fast and slow violence as a ‘single complex’ we can see how the causes and consequences of violence that result in statelessness are often decoupled from one another through the passage of time. Using the case study of the statelessness Vietnamese in Cambodia, the research presented here makes visible how statelessness is politically produced and the ways it infiltrates the everyday and private spaces of the home and the family.