Losing home without going anywhere: Reconceptualising climate-related displacement in international law and policy in ways relevant to Inuit in Greenland

To reduce climate and disaster-related displacement and mobilities to only departures by individuals from a single residence is to fail to understand what it means to be displaced. International legal and policy instruments turn on undefined notions of “home” or “place of habitual residence” as the starting point for measuring displacement. Deconstructing these notions as a matter of law could be useful to avoid leaving the dominant (Eurocentric) understanding of these as implicitly central. Focusing on Greenlandic Inuit, this chapter challenges whether the contemporary legal construction of “displacement” in the context of climate change and disaster can adequately account for the experience, histories, knowledge, and understandings of Indigenous Peoples who experience it. It calls into question whether the conceptualization of displacement from one’s “home or place of habitual residence” is an adequate framework for the Indigenous Peoples who experience it.