Internal Displacement in the Middle East: A Review of the Literature

This paper reviews the limited range of existing scholarship on internal displacement in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. This focuses mainly on internal displacement in specific MENA region countries affected by conflict, and the responses to that phenomenon at the national level. The paper starts by describing the main internal displacement trends across the MENA region with focus on the following countries: Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan. It then reviews how scholarship on internal displacement in MENA region has developed, respectively, in the fields social sciences, arts and humanities; law and policy; and public 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.