Who Gets to Bury Their Bones Here?: Internal Displacement without Mobility under Developmental States

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Abstract

This article examines the spatial violence produced by South Korea’s developmental-state industrialization during the 1970s and 1980s through the concept of “internal displacement without mobility.” Displacement is conventionally understood as involving physical movement—forced relocation, expulsion, or refugee flows. Focusing on the shipbuilding city of Geoje, this study demonstrates how displacement can occur even when people remain in place, as a result of the loss of authority to define and organize the space in which they live.

Situated within South Korea’s Cold War–era developmental strategy, the industrialization of Geoje entailed the large-scale allocation of heavy industry and the reorganization of the national territory around export-oriented production. The construction of shipyards and industrial complexes restructured the region’s entire lifeworld, encompassing land and sea use, housing, education, healthcare, transportation, and modes of labor and social reproduction. Locally sustained ways of life based on agriculture and fishing were relegated to an obsolete past, while industrial labor was presented as the region’s sole viable future. In this process, long-term residents remained physically in place yet experienced the dismantling of their established life worlds, coming to describe themselves as “displaced persons living in their own hometown.”

The article conceptualizes this condition through Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the right to the city, understood as the collective right to produce, define, and transform urban space. Internal displacement without mobility is thus interpreted as the dispossession of this right. At the same time, migrant workers recruited from other regions encountered the industrial city through firm-centered welfare regimes and hierarchical housing arrangements that spatially reproduced corporate power. The industrial city functioned as an internal colony, organizing competition between long-term residents and migrant workers over claims to urban belonging and permanence.

By foregrounding displacement without physical movement, this article contributes to urban political economy debates on industrial urbanization, internal colonialism, and the right to the city, showing how developmental states generate urban dispossession not only through removal, but through enforced staying under conditions of lost urban sovereignty.

Author

• Hyeona Shin, Pusan National University