With unprecedented levels of political repression and the meltdown of their country’s economy, many Zimbabwean women and men have come to view migration as the only way to ensure family survival and to escape persecution and torture. Opportunities for legal,…
Popularly known as “the events”, the 1989 violence between Mauritania and Senegal was triggered by a dispute over grazing rights in the Senegal River valley which forms the border. In Senegal, where many shopkeepers were Mauritanian, shops were looted and…
In trying to develop and implement strategies that support displaced populations, humanitarian and development agencies are faced with a range of difficulties, including the displaced people’s ‘invisibility’ among other urban poor and the consequent lack of available data on them.…
The majority of the world’s population already lives in towns and cities – with nearly 1.5 billion people living in precarious informal and slum settlements. Climate change and the natural disasters linked to it, rising global food crises and higher…
As humanitarian actors develop new modalities for addressing growing levels of urban displacement, a Task Force of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Working Group reviewed the changing context and the main characteristics of the challenges in question.[1] This article is based…
The actual number of refugees, IDPs, returnees and stateless persons in urban areas is extremely difficult to ascertain. Damascus and Amman between them have received more than a million Iraqis, providing the most dramatic but far from the only current…
According to existing data, 93% of the displaced population in Colombia have been displaced to urban areas. At the same time, over the last decade the country has experienced an intense process of rural-urban migration. Bogotá has a population of…
Colombia’s national legislation on internally displaced persons (IDPs) is impressive. The country has a strong judicial system, a Constitutional Court that has consistently upheld the rights of IDPs and a committed network of civil society organisations, including hundreds of IDP…
Where displacement to towns and cities is itself a coping strategy, IDPs may prefer not to display any features that may differentiate them from other urban inhabitants in an effort to avoid becoming targets. Choosing private accommodation over government-sponsored housing…
Attempts to estimate the numbers of people who are internally displaced within their own countries invariably come up against the challenge of estimating those who have been forcibly displaced to urban centres. Calculating the numbers and characteristics of IDPs in…