So much of contemporary Middle Eastern history seems to be marred by subjects in motion: travellers, traders, migrants, refugees, exilees. What if we look at history through the eyes of those who are immobile, whose social experiences are defined by conditions of immobility and stuckness? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an internally-displaced persons [IDP] camp in Southern Kurdistan [Kurdistan Region of Iraq], this paper shows how immobility can be socially generated and maintained. It is the “era of returns” in Iraq: Internally-displaced persons [IDPs] are packing up their belongings, preparing to leave; international NGOs are halting operations; government officers are increasingly calling for what they deem a ‘return to normality’. In the meantime, members of an Arab tribe find themselves in constant fear of being arrested through false accusations of being members of the Islamic State by their previous neighbours. When a person is accused, they find themselves in a thorny social field comprised of what they deem to be immoral others: secret informants, mukhtars that spy on them, opportunist lawyers, sectarian militias and untrustworthy relatives. While humanitarian and governmental organisations underline that they can walk out the door at anytime, these tense social intertwinements render those who are accused fearful and immobile. Through an analysis of social interactions that took place, and stories of violence that were narrated during ethnographic fieldwork between 2017 - 2019 in Southern Kurdistan [Kurdistan Region of Iraq], I argue that such socially generated immobility can be understood through a particular historico-moral sensibility that perceives displacement as binding together a long history of violence that includes British and American Imperialisms, Ba’athism, and sectarian civil war.