The proliferation of internal conflicts in the 1990s gave rise to new interest in the phenomenon of internal displacement. At the beginning of the new millennium, an estimated 25 million people were internally displaced as a result of armed conflict…
The mission of the Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery (BCPR) is "to enhance UNDP's efforts for sustainable development, working with partners to reduce the incidence and impact of disasters and violent conflicts, and to establish the solid foundations for…
Well-informed policy and programme decisions are based on high-quality research. Research in the forced migration field is made difficult by the prevalence of highly mobile and continuously shifting populations in insecure settings. Urban, self-settled and undocumented populations often have an…
Because addressing internal displacement is primarily a duty of governments, promoting national responsibility and accountability is essential. This is no less true in Latin America, where there are some 3.3 million IDPs. Most are found in Colombia in conditions of…
In November 2003 Thomas Nimley Yaya, chairman of the Liberian rebel group MODEL, announced that his soldiers would disarm on one condition: they wanted vocational training in exchange for their guns. In their war-torn country neither money nor food could…
By the end of 2003 there were nearly 25 million people displaced within their own countries by conflicts and human rights violations. During the year, some three million people were forced out of their homes in 2003; a similarly high…
Australians Against Racism (www.australiansagainstracism.org) has published a book bringing together the best refugee stories submitted for an essay competition which ran in primary and secondary schools around Australia. The 37 stories in the collection provide extraordinary accounts written by young…
Roberta recounts that she arrived at the Brookings Institution in 1994 to an empty desk, wondering how to define an IDP. Today internal displacement is a fully-fledged field of study and operations. Roberta’s contribution to this transformation cannot be underestimated.…
It is with great pleasure that I take this opportunity to pay tribute to a dear friend and a close partner in the promotion of international response to the global crisis of internal displacement. Roberta helped pave the way for…
These events were crucial steps in the history of human rights protection because they recognised IDPs as a vulnerable group in need of specific human rights protection. The Guiding Principles, in particular, have become the authoritative text on the human…