Internal Displacement and Responses at the Global Level: A Review of the Scholarship

This paper reviews the scholarship that addresses internal displacement at a global or general level. This includes research on global frameworks or processes concerned with internal displacement as well as that which addresses internal displacement in a general, or non-region/country-specific, way. It starts by describing the main internal displacement trends at the global level. It then reviews how scholarship on internal displacement at a global or general level 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.

The paper forms part of a series of papers published in this Working Paper Series that review the state of the scholarship on internal displacement at the global level and in particular regions as we enter the decade of the 2020s. This research forms part of the Interdisciplinary Network on Displacement, Conflict and Protection (AH/T005351/1) and Global Engagement on Internal Displacement in sub-Saharan Africa (EP/T003227/1) projects, pilots of which were supported by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). It should be read in conjunction with the other review papers in this series.