Crayons and security
I have lived overseas for six years now, including stints in Uganda, Serbia, Bosnia and now Liberia. I have thought of security in different terms in each of these countries. In Uganda when there was a barrage of home robberies…
Security in ICRC field operations
The conflict environment too has changed considerably. For example, the chain of command among combatants has weakened to the point where it is often difficult to distinguish between the armed forces and gangs of bandits. All these factors combined make…
Acompañamiento in Colombia: international human rights protection of IDPs
Peace Brigades International (PBI) is an international NGO, with headquarters in London and national groups in 12 countries, which maintains teams of international observers in conflict areas where a request for international human rights protection has been made by the…
Homogenising humanitarian assistance to IDP communities (a cautionary note from Sri Lanka)
If one were to randomly select a hundred people from any disaster situation or emergency environment, the demographic composition of this group would reveal a wide range of different people from different backgrounds. The attitudes and actions of each in…
Urbanisation and its discontents: urban refugees in Tanzania
There appear to be four distinct categories of urban refugee: (1) those few who are officially defined as refugees and have permission to reside in cities; (2) those officially defined as refugees but lacking legal rights to urban residence; (3)…
The Itaparica Dam Project in north-eastern Brazil: models and reality
Over the last 10-15 years, a minimum of between 80 and 90 million people have been displaced by dam construction and urban transportation projects alone, and each year a further 10 million are uprooted by development projects generally. Given that…
Tensions between the refugee concept and the IDP debate
How tense is the tension between the refugee concept and the IDP debate? In FMR 3, Michael Barutciski notes the attempt to extend to IDPs similar protection as that accorded to refugees and argues that such a development is unnecessary…
Mainstreaming livelihoods support: the Refugee Livelihoods Project
As UNHCR and other agencies move away from their former depiction of refugees as helpless victims of circumstances dependent on the charity of others, the term 'livelihood' has entered the discourse of refugee assistance. This has been accompanied by a…
Challenges to the effective implementation of microfinance programmes in refugee settings
How can microfinance programmes contribute to the livelihood strategies of refugees? There are some important lessons to be learnt from the programme carried out by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya, from 1992 to 2003. The…
Microcredit: an ‘oxygen infusion for a better life'(1)
Azerbaijan is home to 575,000 IDPs who left Nagorny Karabakh and surrounding districts in the early 1990s. According to the UN and World Bank, 70% live below the income poverty line (US$24 per person per month). Azerbaijan's new oil and…