Protecting persons displaced by natural disasters in Zimbabwe: the need for the Kampala Convention

This timely article by one of the world's leading experts on internal displacement highlights the growing crisis of climate-related internal displacement, which is unfolding against the backdrop of drastic funding cuts and humanity's apparent failure to adequately mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Arguing that the world is ill-prepared to address the crisis, including the severe challenges faced by populations living in protracted displacement, the author outlines a bold strategy for change. The blog calls on all stakeholders to acknowledge the severity of loss and damage related to displacement and prioritise durable solutions programming. It also highlights the systemic and financial changes required, including the need to make the still-elusive 'humanitarian-development nexus' a reality. Ultimately, the author makes separate but related recommendations to the United Nations, country donors and affected countries on how, through collaborative multi-year programming, the process of loss associated with displacement can be reversed and deliver sustainable improvements for affected populations.

This article examines how large-scale mining and oil extraction in Ecuador's Amazon systematically displaces Indigenous communities through "dispossessive engineered migration." Analyzing displacement at the Mirador and San Carlos Panantza mines and in Yasuní National Park, the piece shows how over 1,200 Indigenous People have been removed from ancestral territories through militarised evictions, manipulated consultation processes, and environmental degradation that makes land uninhabitable. The article argues that displacement is not an unintended consequence, but a deliberate strategy driven by state and corporate interests, effectively treating Indigenous Territories as disposable assets. The piece calls for demilitarising development projects, enforcing Free, Prior and Informed Consent as binding law rather than bureaucratic formality, reforming compensation frameworks to account for cultural loss, and strengthening Indigenous leadership in development decisions.

This article examines the right to return for internally displaced persons within the context of post-war resettlement, focusing on Sri Lankan IDPs and the military-bureaucratic apparatus they must navigate to return home. It demonstrates how military interests and the political significance of contested territories continue to override humanitarian considerations in the Northern and Eastern provinces, producing ‘ethnocratic regimes’, or governance systems that privilege territorial control whilst marginalising ethnic minorities through spatial regulation. The author argues that land distribution continues to function as a tool of state-making and power consolidation, even as it appears to remedy decades of displacement. Ultimately, bureaucratic controls, militarised surveillance, and procedural barriers in accessing land serve to reinforce ethno-territorial politics, reframing religious and ethnic minority IDPs not as bearers of rights but as populations requiring management and control.