Protect and Repress: The Logic of Government Responses to Internal Displacement

More than 117 million people are currently displaced by violence and persecution, the highest number ever recorded. Most never become refugees, instead remaining in their home countries as internally displaced people (IDPs). Yet the bulk of scholarly and policy attention is focused on refugees. We know quite a lot about how states respond to refugees, and comparatively little about how they treat IDPs. Therefore the question GRID asks is: What explains how and why governments respond to IDPs?We urgently need new conceptual, theoretical and empirical tools to answer this question. Government responses to the internally displaced vary widely. GRID develops a new conceptualization of these responses as protection and repression of IDPs. Protective responses provide humanitarian resources and public services to the internally displaced, and guarantee property, political, and other rights. Repressive responses involve the military or police forces and cause new displacement or restrict IDPs’ mobility by forcing them into camps. The project theorizes that political alignment between the national government, IDPs, and local authorities accounts for where the government allocates protection for IDPs and where it deploys repression against IDPs. To refine and test the conceptual and theoretical framework, the project integrates methods across levels of analysis. It will contribute a cross-national dataset on both protective and repressive responses to internal displacement, as well as three mixed-methods analyses on a diverse set of cases: Colombia, Burundi, and Iraq. Finally, it also investigates how IDPs themselves react to government protection and repression.The findings will generate crucial insights into how governments protect and repress the internally displaced, the connections between internal displacement and refugee and asylum-seeker flows, and how protections for the displaced can be improved.