The State of Research on Internal Displacement in Africa

This paper reviews the scholarship on internal displacement in Africa, focusing mainly on countries affected by conflict and other crises

Published on June 19, 2020

Romola Adeola | idrp, Law/Policy, Social Science, Regional, Africa

This paper reviews the scholarship on internal displacement in Africa. This focuses mainly on internal displacement in African countries affected by conflict and other crises, and the responses to that phenomenon at the national and regional levels. The paper starts by describing the main internal displacement trends across Africa as a region. It then reviews how scholarship on internal displacement in Africa has developed, respectively, in the fields of law and policy, other social sciences and humanities, and health and medicine. It ends by offering conclusions on the scope of existing research and directions for future study.

This review of the scholarly literature seeks to identify principal trends, gaps and opportunities relating to research on internal displacement. Towards this end, the review concentrates on academic publications, including monographs, chapters in edited volumes and peer-reviewed articles, from the early 1990s until the start of 2020, a period of approximately 30 years. It thus offers not only a critical review of the state of the art in this field of study but also a key point of reference for researchers looking to develop our understanding of internal displacement from the standpoint of a variety of different disciplines and themes.

Dr Romola Adeola is a Fellow and Director of GENIDA at University of Pretoria, South Africa.

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