Welcome address
On behalf of the Norwegian Refugee Council, it is a pleasure for me to welcome you all to this conference. NRC’s interest in the conference is twofold: Firstly, as an NGO active in promoting the rights of the internally displaced,…
Introductory address
In Norwegian we have an expression: ‘to fall between two chairs’. I think the English equivalent is to ‘fall between the cracks’. In many ways, this describes the situation of IDPs. On the one hand, they have often been…
IDPs: an anthropological perspective
I would like to thank the Norwegian Refugee Council, NTNU and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) for inviting us all to this seminar on the response strategies of people who are displaced by conflict within the borders of their…
Response strategies – the need to involve the displaced
I would like to start with an overview of the Response Strategies Project. We started with two principal objectives, the first of which was to understand how individuals in communities respond to displacement. We felt that, while there was a…
Internal displacement in Georgia: a personal perspective
I speak as an IDP woman whose husband was missing after the war in Georgia, displaced with two small children, no shelter and no job. I speak also as a leader of an NGO which I set up with several…
My experience as a leader of the displaced in Colombia
In the 1980s the department of Cordoba started to be affected by the presence of paramilitary groups and by their actions against the civil population, especially against peasant, community and union leaders. At the end of the 1990s, I was…
IDPs: time to move forward
Governments and the UN believe that the response to internal displacement has often been ineffective. In order to strengthen the international community’s response in situations of internal displacement, a new Unit has been established under the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee.…
The Guiding Principles – How do they support IDP response strategies?
It is a great pleasure to be in Oslo again. I would like to thank the Norwegian Refugee Council and its Secretary-General Steinar Sørlie and the Global IDP Project led by Marc Vincent for the important work they are doing…
Final plenary session remarks
I should like to share with you a few impressions from a number of IDP conferences that I have attended over the last four or five years. There have been IDP conferences, symposia, seminars, round tables, square tables, all sorts…
Conference discussions
Working group I - research Transformations in local organisations, institutions and leadership Birgitte Refslund Sørensen The Response Strategies project has broken new ground in identifying IDP response strategies. From this study and other ongoing research projects emerge a number of…