In 2021, the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on IDPs painted a stark picture of the expanding number of forced migrants worldwide and outlined a series of challenges related to the provision of humanitarian assistance, protection, and ‘durable solutions’ for IDPs. The Panel also provided a series of recommendations to improve national and international responses to IDPs –including through more research on IDPs and strengthened academic engagement on these responses.
In response to this call, the primary objective of this new research project is to develop a landmark, comparative study of the localization of international norms on IDP protection, centering the roles of IDPs themselves and focusing on responses to two critical challenges: acute risks to IDPs’ physical security, and the pursuit of durable solutions to displacement. The project will draw on theories of localization and sovereignty from the field of International Relations (IR), alongside original empirical and normative analyses, to address five inter-related questions:
(1) How have international norms on the protection of IDPs been localized since the adoption of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement in 1998?
(2) What have been the consequences and limitations of these localization efforts and how can we explain them?
(3) How have IDPs figured as agents in localization processes?
(4) What are the implications of this empirical analysis for normative understandings of internal displacement, particularly from the perspective of international normative theory, political theory, and citizenship studies?
(5) What insights does this analysis offer for improved policy and practice on IDP protection?
Project Members
Dr. Patricia García Amado, postdoctoral researcher
Dr. Ileana Nicolau, postdoctoral researcher
Graduate research assistants:
Guadalupe Jolicoeur
Elsie Mares
Jumana Khafaji
Arwa Emhemed