Housing destruction and forced expulsions were used as a method of ethnic cleansing during the war in Bosnia Herzegovina (BiH). Thirty-seven per cent of pre-war housing stock was partially or totally destroyed. When the Dayton Peace Agreement ended conflict in…
Studies of Palestinian refugees have tended to by-pass the domestic domain, ignoring the many ways in which ‘home’ is articulated in the national struggle, as a symbol of loss, as the ultimate goal of struggle and also as the basis…
In view of the critical role played by house, land and spatially grounded community in Eritrean culture and social history, researchers and international agencies assumed that returnees from Sudan would settle in their villages of origin in order to recoup…
Large areas of Sri Lanka affected by two decades of war are now suffering the effects of the tsunami. Before the waves hit the coast of Sri Lanka on 26 December 2004 the NTNU Research Group on Forced Migration had…
The Asian tsunami of 26 December 2004 destroyed lives and entire Indian Ocean coastal communities. Within minutes of an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale striking the west coast of northern Sumatra in Indonesia, the first large tsunami hit…
In the 12 tsunami-affected countries approximately 240,000 people were killed, 50,000 are missing and feared dead and more than one million persons were displaced. Poor coastal communities were worst hit. In many affected areas, three times more women were killed…
Protection concerns include access to assistance, discrimination in aid provision, enforced relocation, sexual and gender-based violence, recruitment of children into fighting forces, loss of documentation, safe and voluntary return or resettlement and issues of property restitution. The more the tsunami-affected…
The tsunami was a tragic reminder that some people are always more vulnerable than others. The vast majority who lost their lives were people living in poverty, forced to live in inadequate housing along the shoreline. In the Maldives –…
Once again as post-tsunami aid poured in we heard the old refrain: “This time it’s going to be different, this time we will not fail the victims”. Six months on, it is time to ask just how different from other…
On 3 June 2005, at the time of writing this article, the UN’s Financial Tracking Service (FTS)[1] reported that the UN’s flash appeals and consolidated appeals, which outline the programmes of key UN agencies and NGOs, were 41% funded. When…