This first article in RID's miniseries, Towards Dignified Climate Relocation: Community Perspectives from around the Globe, is a moving account of the challenges faced by community members of El Bosque, Tabasco, Mexico, who began to plan relocation in 2022 due to severe coastal erosion. Written by members of two organisations that have advocated for the community, the article recounts the successful legal and communications campaign that persuaded the Government of Mexico to support relocation, as well as the challenges faced during a planned relocation process that did not fully prioritise a participatory, rights-based approach.

The article calls on the Mexican government to remedy the harms to the community while ensuring better future programming through policy changes. It also offers vital lessons for governments, communities and development actors around the globe on community participation, transparent and constant communication, focus on economic and non-economic loss and damage and the need for continuous access to livelihoods, education and health services.

As the Russian war on Ukraine grinds on and the impacts of Ukraine’s resistance and counterattack spread inland in Russia, the conflict is taking its toll not only on Ukrainians but on Russian civilians, in particular, the large but underreported internally displaced population of Russians forced to flee their homes by the conflict. Building on an earlier piece written by the author for RID, this new research article examines the true extent of internal displacement in Russia and the growing challenges of IDPs, with particular focus on Belgorod, Bryansk, and Kursk, three of the most impacted regions. The article spotlights the inadequacy of official efforts to protect and compensate people displaced by the conflict, reflecting both the absence of the category of "internally displaced persons" in Russian law and Russia's apparent reticence to formally acknowledge the extent of displacement and, thereby, its responsibility toward internally displaced persons. This reticence, the article argues, is linked to increasingly dire national finances, depleted by the cost of the war and international economic sanctions. More fundamentally, however, it reflects the Russian government's unwillingness to acknowledge, even indirectly, that the "special military operation", now in its fifty-sixth month, has not gone according to plan.

This insightful article examines durable solutions programming to conflict and climate-related displacement in the Horn of Africa. Despite growing investments in durable solutions by development actors, the stated programmatic goals of restoring self-reliance, dignity and stability to displacement-affected communities remain elusive. Instead, climatic stressors, especially drought, regularly undermine the stability that solutions programming is intended to deliver.

The blog calls for a fundamental shift in how durable solutions are understood in the context of climate change. Experience in the Horn of Africa demonstrates that durable solutions must be positioned not as a fixed end-state achieved once people have returned home or resettled elsewhere and pre-displacement conditions have been restored, but as an ongoing adaptive process that enables people and communities to build the capacities needed to adapt to future environmental shocks. Otherwise, the author argues, communities that appear to be progressing toward self-reliance are likely to experience re-displacement, protracted displacement and other setbacks as subsequent climate shocks erode recovery gains.

This incisive and provocative blog calls attention to the failure of IDP governance and humanitarian systems in Nigeria to adjust to the urbanisation of displacement. Drawing on a ten-city interdisciplinary research project conducted over a seven-year period, the article argues that despite the highly visible shift toward IDP self-settlement in urban centres, established IDP protection systems and actors blindly cling to decreasingly relevant paradigms that prioritise conflict zones and IDP camps. This has left the growing number of urban IDPs in Nigeria without adequate rights protections and structurally excluded from urban services and institutions, even as their presence profoundly reshapes urban spaces.

The author argues that IDP rights protections and the provision of lasting solutions must be embedded within mainstream systems of urban governance. Government and humanitarian actors need to move beyond treating internal displacement as an exceptional but temporary humanitarian emergency and, instead, recognise urban IDPs as long-term residents whose inclusion is essential to equitable and sustainable urban and national development.

Internal displacement is a major societal challenge worldwide, with far-reaching consequences for the tens of millions of people displaced annually as well as for affected communities and society as a whole. As such, the low level of interest in this phenomenon among researchers and policymakers represents a puzzle. A new Handbook of Internal Displacement seeks to change this situation by raising the profile of the issue for researchers, teachers, policymakers, funders, humanitarian workers and development actors and addressing the wide range of dynamics, debates and challenges that internal displacement entails. This groundbreaking publication provides extensive regional analysis of displacement in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and offers a distinctive global vision of “internal displacement” as an emerging field of research and practice.

This insightful blog examines how internally displaced persons (IDPs) in India are disenfranchised from voting and participating fully in civic life. Widespread failure to recognise people’s displacement status and circumstances shifts many of the burdens of proving identity, residence and voter eligibility onto the shoulders of already traumatised people. IDPs fleeing disasters, conflict or communal violence may have lost their homes and documentation, crossed state boundaries and taken refuge in regions where their native languages are not spoken. Digital access challenges and bureaucratic inefficiencies place the burden of administrative adaptation on those least able to bear it. Too many IDPs are thereby excluded from voter lists. Though India records large numbers of new disaster displacements every year, it does not maintain a consolidated national displacement database. Such a database, the author argues, would ensure the voting and other rights of internally displaced persons are protected while providing a much-needed tool for monitoring whether IDPs are progressing toward durable solutions.

This brief paper highlights the problem of "circular displacement". In Lebanon, displacement is not an event with a clear beginning and end. Nor is it simply a recurring cycle. For many affected people, it is an ongoing condition where the effects of displacement are never fully resolved and where each recurring cycle leaves people's lives further depleted.

The effects are especially acute for the many stateless people displaced in a country that does not fully recognise them. Caught in a cycle of conflict and legal exclusion, stateless people in Lebanon, including Dom, Bedouin and Palestinians from Syria, struggle to access formal protection systems, restore documentation or even leave the country. Describing how existing international frameworks intended to address displacement and statelessness fail in Lebanon, the author highlights the need for both operational and legal reforms, including the establishment of a statelessness determination procedure.

This moving and insightful blog, from a long-time climate advocate and champion of youth in India, examines the lived experience of 'loss and damage' by young people from the coastal state of Odisha displaced by sea level rise. Describing the broad range of intangible losses experienced by displaced youth - ranging from loss of cultural heritage and identity to adverse impacts on psychosocial health and personal agency - the article calls for a more nuanced and compassionate understanding of 'non-economic loss and damage' (NELD), a concept used in climate change negotiations and other discourses but which doesn't adequately capture the depth and complexity of the losses and damages experienced by displaced young people. The author argues that these experiences should serve as a stark warning: If disaster management policies and climate adaptation planning do not urgently recognise and address the intangible losses of young people, we risk losing an entire generation to displacement, trauma and disenfranchisement.