Protecting internally displaced women and girls from sexual gender based violence in Nigeria

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.