Internal Displacement in South Asia: The Relevance of the UN’s Guiding Principles

Recent decades have witnessed an enormous increase in the number of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in South Asia. These are people who have been forcibly displaced due to violence, war, natural disasters or development projects. The vulnerability of IDPs is compounded because, unlike refugees, they are confined to the state within which they were forced to migrate, and do not get the international legal protection that international refugee laws provide for refugees. This paucity of legal mechanisms to govern their rehabilitation and care in South Asia has added to the gravity of this humanitarian disaster. This volume is a sequel to the earlier volume published by sage, refugees and the state. While that volume deals with refugee flows, this volume presents a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of internal displacement in the light of the United Nations’ guiding principles on internal displacement. It does this through detailed case studies of seven countries–India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma and Afghanistan. It examines various legal and administrative practices prevalent in these countries in terms of care, protection and justice. By highlighting the gender dimension and combining a political perspective with a close study of international and national legal norms and administrative practices, the contributors provide a comparative understanding of internal displacement in the entire South Asian region. With the help of the UN guiding principles, they also suggest crucial policy measures that will help countries deal with this major, yet largely un-noticed, humanitarian disaster. The first of its kind and with its strongly analytical and legal perspective covering the entire South Asian region, this incisive and timely compendium will be of great interest to policy makers, human rights activists, jurists, and scholars and students of politics, international relations, migration, sociology, social anthropology, law and history.