A Spatial Model of Internal Displacement and Forced Migration

2020 ◽  
pp. 002200272095847
Author(s):  
Jon Echevarria-Coco ◽  
Javier Gardeazabal

This article develops a spatial model of internal and external forced migration. We propose a model reminiscent of Hotelling’s spatial model in economics and Schelling’s model of segregation. Conflict is modeled as a shock that hits a country at certain location and generates displacement of people located near the shock’s location. Some displaced people cross a border, thus becoming refugees, while others remain as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). The model delivers predictions about how the fractions of a country’s population that become refugees and IDPs ought to be related with the intensity of the shock, country size, terrain ruggedness and the degree of geographical proximity of the country with respect to the rest of the world. The predictions of the model are then tested against real data using a panel of 161 countries covering the period 1995-2016. The empirical evidence is mostly in line with the predictions of the model.

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-36
Author(s):  
Agbo Friday Ojonugwa

Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are usually forced to flee or leave their homes, particularly in situations of armed conflict. They are displaced within their national territories and are generally subject to heightened suffering and vulnerability in many cases. It is also essential to state that the issue of internal displacement has become prominent because of the realisation that peace and reconstruction in conflict-ridden societies depend on the effective settlement and reintegration of displaced persons. Nigeria is a country that has a history of conflicts and displaced people. There has been a challenge in finding lasting peace through the employment of conflict resolution techniques and also the challenge of catering for the welfare of internally displaced persons in the country. However, peace and development without taking into account the settlement, return, and reintegration of IDPs. These desirous objectives are proving quite difficult in Nigeria as many challenges confront the government, policymakers, and humanitarian NGOs in providing the IDPs with their rights and needs. Some of the challenges can easily be overcome while some are more tasking requiring concerted efforts and massive resources to overcome. The aim of this article is to highlights the significant challenges confronting IDPs and provides some solutions to these challenges. In adopting the doctrinal method in discussions, the article finds that enormous challenges abound that confront IDPs in Nigeria, and it finds that there is the need for the government to find urgent solutions to the challenges of IDPs for the wellbeing of IDPs  


Author(s):  
Dawn Chatty

Dispossession and displacement have always afflicted life in the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa. Waves of people have been displaced from their homeland as a result of conflicts and social illnesses. At the end of the nineteenth century, Circassian Muslims and Jewish groups were dispossessed of their homes and lands in Eurasia. This was followed by the displacement of the Armenians and Christian groups in the aftermath of the First World War. They were followed by Palestinians who fled from their homes in the struggle for control over Palestine after the Second World War. In recent times, almost 4 million Iraqis have left their country or have been internally displaced. And in the summer of 2006, Lebanese, Sudanese and Somali refugees fled to neighbouring countries in the hope of finding peace, security and sustainable livelihoods. With the increasing number of refugees, this book presents a discourse on displacement and dispossession. It examines the extent to which forced migration has come to define the feature of life in the Middle East and North Africa. It presents researches on the refugees, particularly on the internally displaced people of Iran and Afghanistan. The eleven chapters in this book deal with the themes of displacement, repatriation, identity in exile and refugee policy. They cover themes such as the future of the Turkish settlers in northern Cyprus; the Hazara migratory networks between Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and the Western countries; the internal displacement among Kurds in Iraq and Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; the Afghan refugee youth as a ‘burnt generation’ on their post-conflict return; Sahrawi identity in refugee camps; and the expression of the ‘self’ in poetry for Iran refugees and oral history for women Iraqi refugees in Jordan.


2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-440

Forced migration has come to be the defining feature of the contemporary Middle East, a region that is both the source of and host to some of the largest forcibly displaced populations in the world. In 2015, 65 percent of the world's 19.4 million refugees—including the 5.5 million Palestinian refugees—as well as 30 percent of the world's thirty-eight million internally displaced persons were in the Middle East, while one out of every four refugees worldwide was from Syria. Seeking security and stability, millions of people from the region are on the move within and across social spaces that are at once strange and familiar, and in which they themselves are familiar and strange to others. In 2015, Turkey became host to the world's largest refugee population of over two million, while Zaʿatari camp in Jordan has grown rapidly to become one of the world's largest camps since the Syrian civil war began. With 7.6 million people—or 35 percent of the population—internally displaced, Syria now has the highest number of internally displaced persons in the world. Iraq has produced multiple overlapping displacements, resulting in one of the largest refugee resettlement programs of the past decade. Thousands of Syrians, Libyans, and Iraqis have undertaken perilous journeys across the Mediterranean Sea to seek asylum in Europe and elsewhere. Palestinian refugees are now in a fourth generation of exile, making their plight the longest running unresolved refugee situation in the world.


2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-240
Author(s):  
Roseanne Njiru

This article foregrounds the overlapping continuum of local to global fault lines that structure the human security experiences of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Kenya. Drawing on data from the 2007–2008 electoral violence-induced displacement of ethnic minorities in the Rift Valley region, the article discusses how the intersections of ethnicity, national politics, land rights, and global humanitarian politics on displacement positioned IDPs as outsiders in their own nation and how this shapes their ability to live secure lives. By so doing, the study transcends nation-state border focused forced migration to question the relevance of dichotomizing IDPs and refugees, which shapes their protection. The author argues for the need to critically examine the less visible and fluid borders which displace people from their homelands in order to address the human security of all who are forced to flee from their homes regardless of whether they have crossed national boundaries.


2005 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 5-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bilgin Ayata ◽  
Deniz Yükseker

Internal displacement has replaced the flows of border-crossing refugees as the major form of forced migration across the world in the past two decades. International organizations seek to have a central role in providing assistance to internally displaced persons (IDPs) although this phenomenon comes under the traditional realm of state sovereignty, in contrast to the refugee regime, which is part of international law. The evolving international IDP regime has triggered policy and scholarly debates about various aspects of state responsibility and international assistance. On one hand, when states fail to provide protection to the displaced, the decision to take international action is often selective and depends to a large extent on the balance of geopolitical interests of powerful donor states. On the other hand, extant international humanitarian assistance practices also face criticism for having created new modes of power over displaced groups.


KPGT_dlutz_1 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-274
Author(s):  
Eveline Vieira Brigido ◽  
Fabiola Wust Zibetti ◽  
Liton Lanes Pilau Sobrinho

This article aims to analyze the potential impact of forced internal displacement on international refugee migration, considering the relation between internal and international migration: Are today’s IDPs tomorrow’s refugees? It is likely that many refugees were forcibly displaced in their own countries before applying for asylum. Therefore, to develop this investigation, this article is divided into three sections. In the first section, it presents a general approach about internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees, including definitions and the bases of its protection under international law. Afterwards, it analyzes data on international migration and on internal displacement. At the end, these data are compared and possible link between internal and international forced migration is analyzed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-64
Author(s):  
Vickie Frater ◽  
Phil Orchard

Counting forced migrants runs into a number of hurdles related to their classification, to their experience of flight, and to the need to use myriad sources of data from governments, international organisations, and non-governmental organisations. To complicate matters, three organisations have mandates to count different groups – the un Relief Works Agency (unrwa) for Palestine refugees, the un High Commission for Refugees (unhcr) for refugees more generally, and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (idmc) for internally displaced persons (idps). All three face a range of common challenges in carrying out this vital aspect of their respective mandates. These include conceptual challenges, political concerns, competing interests and access. They also face their own political and institutional challenges, leading to individualised approaches and variance across and even within the organisations. In spite of these complexities, there have been significant improvements in the reliability of data and new technologies and registration methods are providing a way forward to a better understanding of forced migrant movements.


Author(s):  
A. Sheludchenkova ◽  
O. Spector ◽  
A. Derkach

The author defines the notion of the internally displaced people, analyses the reasons of their appearance and compares the internally displaced people and refugees’ legal status. Internally Displaced Persons were defined in 1992 by the Commission on Human rights as “Persons or groups who have been forced to flee their homes suddenly or unexpectedly in large numbers, as a result of armed conflict, internal strife, systematic violations of human rights or natural or man-made disaster, and who are within the territory of their own country”. There is no universal legally binding instrument for protecting and assisting internally displaced persons. The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement were recognized by the UN General Assembly are not of a binding character.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172110076
Author(s):  
Jamie Draper

This article develops a normative theory of the status of ‘internally displaced persons’. Political theorists working on forced migration have paid little attention to internally displaced persons, but internally displaced persons bear a distinctive normative status that implies a set of rights that its bearer can claim and correlate duties that others owe. This article develops a practice-based account of justice in internal displacement, which aims to answer the questions of who counts as an internally displaced person and what is owed to internally displaced persons (and by whom). The first section addresses the question of who counts as an internally displaced person by offering an interpretation of the conditions of non-alienage and involuntariness. The second section articulates an account of what is owed to internally displaced persons that draws on and refines the idea of ‘occupancy rights’. The third section sets out an account of the role of the international community in supplementing the protection of internally displaced persons by their own states.


Author(s):  
Leila Bijos

The aim of this research is to analyze immigration and internal displacement focusing on human rights. The analysis will concentrate on conflict induced internal displacement, causes of internal displacement due to environment change, natural disasters, which are in mostof the cases interlinked with political conflicts, causing the forced movement of families .This is an empirical research which critically will examine the changing dynamics of forced displacement and the challenges faced by affected states and the international community.More specifically, it analyzes key developments in immigration policy and practice; it re-examines the contemporary scenario around durable solutions in a context of policy issues related to internally displaced persons and stateless population.


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