Humanitarian crises are increasing in number, duration and their impact on civil society. In the first half of the 1990s, 70 states were involved in 93 wars. More than half of these conflicts lasted over five years, forty percent lasted…
There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, there is a perception of greater insecurity with more personnel being injured or killed. Although trends cannot be accurately assessed as most agencies do not keep proper records, it is the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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)…
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…
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…
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…