On 20 July, following their Third Annual Conference, the Refugee Law Initiative (RLI) hosted a special one-day workshop on internally displaced persons (IDPs) entitled ‘Revitalising IDP Research’. The workshop was designed to mark and celebrate 20 years of the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and to take a step towards consolidating and revitalising academic interest in IDP issues.
This workshop was generously supported by the John Coffin Trust.
Context:
The 20th anniversary of the adoption in 1998 of the UN Guiding Principles offered a unique opportunity to reflect not only on their influence on internal displacement globally but also on the global state of research and practice on internally displaced persons (IDPs). This special IDP Workshop provided a forum for researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and students to come together to present, debate and reflect on this field and its future. It offered the chance to begin developing new research and policy agendas and collaborations.
Urgent debate and new thinking on IDPs is required by the sheer scale of the challenges. Since 1998, the Guiding Principles have promoted a common approach to IDPs. Yet over 40 million IDPs remain displaced due to conflict. Over 200 million were displaced due to disasters in just the last ten years. These figures dwarf the number of refugees (22.5 million).
Moreover, with IDPs present in more than 125 countries, attention to IDPs is a major part of the humanitarian effort. Similarly, higher levels of poverty among IDPs means that internal displacement also represents a real challenge for the development and security sectors. Yet a relative paucity of new thinking and research on IDPs marks the past ten years. This is reflected in the fact that there are no dedicated academic research centres focused on IDP issues.
