Urban internally displaced persons (IDPs): The South Sudan’s experience with a focus on Juba

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.

This short article argues why a decolonial approach to planned relocation is essential, particularly in contexts where states have demonstrated a proclivity to weaponise development and climate change adaptation in pursuit of nation-building, including minoritisation. Looking at Bangladesh as a case study, the article examines the colonial roots and dubious application of "guccharam", the "cluster village" program, in the Chittagong Hill Tracks region of Bangladesh, an area of non-Bengali Indigenous Peoples. Ultimately, the author argues that because planned relocations can have profound effects on communities and the broader political and social fabric, for example, leading to political and social minoritisation of certain ethnic groups, a much higher level of scrutiny of states and their "state-making" ambitions is called for. As this case study demonstrates, viewing the state's approach to combatting climate change normatively risks erasing the ways in which many states have committed violence against their own citizens, potentially leading to the normalisation of further harm.