It is estimated that 4.3 million people globally were affected by forced evictions in 2007-08. In the developing world especially, there is a hope that grassroots mobilisation can serve as a means for marginalised groups to address such challenges. Dar…
Among humanitarians and students of international law, Fridtjof Nansen is mainly remembered as the first High Commissioner for Refugees whose ‘Nansen passport’ provided a degree of international protection to scores of paperless refugees. A wider public knows him as the…
Thirty years ago ICARA 1 (International Conference on Assistance to Refugees in Africa, 1981) and ICARA 2 (1984) highlighted the ‘burden’ that refugees place on their hosts: imposing additional costs on already hard-pressed public and social welfare budgets, arresting economic…
Cultural orientation (CO) programmes operate in over 40 countries to facilitate the resettlement of refugees in the United States (US). These programmes focus on employment, housing, education, health, money management, travel, hygiene and the role of the resettlement agency. Previous…
NGOs that provide support in the Global South for refugees and asylum seekers in the refugee status determination process (RSD) or with respect to asylum claims usually host both domestic and foreign attorneys in their offices. What, then, should their…
Since internal displacement takes place within the boundaries of a state, its prevention and the protection of internally displaced persons (IDPs) are first and foremost a duty of the concerned state. However, other states not confronted with displacement on their…
Internal displacement for Georgia is not a new problem. While people displaced by the August 2008 war over South Ossetia are still displaced five years later, IDPs from Abkhazia have been displaced for almost 20 years and IDPs from Tskhinvali…
Age, gender and diversity Twenty-five years ago, refugee populations were often regarded as if they were an undifferentiated mass of people characterised by the single fact that they had been forced to leave their own country and seek sanctuary in…
Nearly 90% of the world’s youth live in poorer countries. The well-recognised connection between poverty, violent conflict and forced migration means that adolescents and youth often constitute the majority of both displaced and host populations. In violent conflict, it is…
In Malawi, 45km north of the capital city of Lilongwe, lies the Dzaleka refugee camp, home to approximately 15,000 refugees and asylum seekers from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia and Ethiopia. As a signatory to the…