Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Journal

New York University Journal of International Law and Politics (forthcoming)

Volume

57

Abstract

Internal displacement, encapsulating the phenomenon of people who are dislocated from their homes but remain within the border of their countries of origin, was once a forced migratory occurrence interchangeable with cross-border migration. This changed after the Second World War with the promulgation of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which was premised on an insistence of making a legal line in the sand based on which side of a border displacement ultimately transpires. Internally displaced persons (IDPs)—in recent history, presently, and in the projected future—far outpace the number of people displaced outside the border of their home countries. Both rhetorical maneuverings and traditional international legal theories have prevented a robust exploration of normative frameworks that would ensure enhanced protections for the causes and experiences of internal displacement.

This Article places the experiences of IDPs within the context of the politically charged project of labeling migration to inform the international governance of migration insofar as determining which populations forcibly on the move are deserving of international protection. It provides a comprehensive account of existing international, regional, and domestic displacement instruments, and highlights how international climate change and other general migration agreements fall significantly short of adequately addressing the phenomenon of ongoing and growing incidents of internal displacement. This Article offers a vision of forced movement that treats human mobility as incidents that are not static, but instead as often occurring on a continuum traversing physical nation-state borders. In doing so, it offers a re-framing of people on the move so that international legal mechanisms are germane to the critical project of extending protection to vulnerable communities regardless of which side of a border they face displacement.

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