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Chapter Abstract
The displacement of people within their own countries owing to crises such as conflicts, disasters, and the effects of climate change is a major contemporary challenge, eliciting global concern about how to protect the displaced. The vast scale of this ‘internal displacement’ poses far-reaching questions for key debates around humanitarian aid, development, migration, sovereignty, rights, citizenship, identity, and social change. Yet knowledge of the issue is fragmented and dispersed across a range of academic and policy domains. Bringing together 45 contributions by leading researchers and practitioners, the Handbook of Internal Displacement provides an essential point of reference for advancing these debates and raising the profile of internal displacement as a vital issue for research and policy agendas. This chapter introduces internal displacement as a field of research and practice. It begins by explaining how the apparently heterogenous phenomenon of ‘internal displacement’ is conceptualized, before showing how growing engagement with the situation of internally displaced persons (IDPs) by scholars, governments, UN agencies, civil society, and others has transformed it into a distinct field of research and practice. The chapter identifies and introduces eight major areas of debate in this field which serve to structure the eight parts of the Handbook. Following a short explanation of the scope of each debate, the chapter outlines how the contributing chapters in each part of the Handbook advance these debates. It concludes by reflecting on the future of the field and the contribution of this Handbook.