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When President Felipe Calderón launched his offensive against the drug cartels in 2006, the cartels struck back viciously, murdering politicians, journalists and civilians and terrorising the Mexican people. Over 28,000 people have been killed in the past four years. While the situation has captured attention in the US and internationally as a border-control and immigration issue, few have commented on the internal displacement crisis that the conflict has created in the border region.

The maintenance of local peace and order in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan (FATA) bordering Afghanistan is the responsibility of traditional tribal councils (jirgas). A jirga commonly resolves disputes peacefully but it also has the authority to form…

The African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance to Internally Displaced Persons, adopted in October 2009 – known as the Kampala Convention – reflects and builds on the existing frameworks of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights…

In Holder v HLP the Supreme Court was asked to respond to complaints filed in 1998 and 2003 by several humanitarian organisations who felt that the US legal code’s prohibitions under the Material Support statute (18 U.S.C § 2339B) were overly vague and violated the right to freedom of speech and association, protected under the First Amendment to the US Constitution:

The overwhelming majority of today’s armed conflicts are not fought between the armies of opposing states but between the government forces of a state and one or several non-state armed groups (NSAGs). While civilians have always had to suffer from the consequences of warfare, this trend implies a number of additional challenges.

There are – on a regular basis – new instances of displacement.This observation suggests that it is in preventing internal displacement that governments and the international community are failing.

In 2009 the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) launched the first phase of its ‘Conversations’ process  with meetings with several heads of key agencies interested in aspects of migration (IOM, UNHCR, ILO, UNITAR, UNDP).

Demarcations between a trafficked person, a smuggled person, a refugee, a documented migrant and an undocumented migrant are spelled out ever more painstakingly in international conventions and in domestic laws and policies but the reality of people’s lives is far more complex than one label can encompass.