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The 1990s ushered in a new era in which humanitarian issues played a historically unprecedented role in international politics. Refugee movements in northern Iraq, Somalia, former Yugoslavia, and Haiti were the subject of increasing discussion in political and military fora such as the UN Security Council and NATO. Forced displacements were also at the centre of crises in the African Great Lakes region, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Albania, Kosovo, and East Timor. The eighth High Commissioner, Sadako Ogata, initiated changes within UNHCR that permitted it to respond to internal displacements in ongoing civil wars as well as to promote mass repatriation movements to countries of origin in Central America, Southeast Asia, and Africa. These events have significant implications for the protection of refugees and for the future of humanitarianism.

In the 1990s, new conflicts broke out, particularly in connection with the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as well as several places in Africa. Initiatives were invented and re‐invented, and policy responses reverted to a largely reactive mode.

Ethnic and internal conflicts, which produced displacement emerged as key features of the decade, and sorely tested the capacity of the international community to respond to crises of forced displacement. The so‐called ‘CNN effect”’ led to engagement as well as disengagement (Somalia) and the term ‘nation building’ came into vogue and then later became an epithet. At the outset of the twenty‐first century, refugee policy is driven by selective apathy and creeping trepidation.

Different policy futures could result from preferences such as containment, international cooperation, or taking a proactive approach. The continuing problem of forced displacement makes international cooperation and proactive policy important objectives. Yet, achieving cooperative arrangements in the midst of crisis can be difficult. Policy reform may thus depend on marshalling and promoting a variety of counter‐intuitive factors and motivations in advance of crisis—i.e., leadership. In order to foster more international cooperation on refugee arrangements, an international organizational mechanism is needed to map out the interests and incentives to promote more concerted and sustainable humanitarian policy.

This chapter explains how Plan Colombia has assaulted the human rights to life, safety, and subsistence of millions of Colombians and thus worsened the problem of internally forced displacement. It focuses on forced displacement, its causes, and the human costs of displacement for those affected by it. It emphasizes Plan Colombia—the process of its creation, its logic and assumptions, as well as the evolution of its aims and strategies as it has been implemented. It examines the impact of Plan Colombia on forced displacement and ponders the particular responsibility borne by the United States for worsening this crisis. Through promotion and support for Plan Colombia, the U.S. national security agenda has negatively impacted uncounted communities in Colombia, and now threatens to expand its negative consequences across the whole Andean region. The pursuit of U.S. official policy objectives by primarily military means has yielded dubious gains while worsening already grave threats to security for millions of Colombians, forcing many to flee their homes and land and seek safety somewhere else within the national territory or neighboring countries.

This chapter presents a continuation of the overview and analysis of the second chapter. The story is picked up at the close of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris negotiations, which, in the form of the decision of 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21), created a specific entity to work on the issue of migration and climate change and thus marked the beginning of a new era of policy making in this area. This analysis covers the time period from 2015 until the end of 2018, when this entity—the Task Force on Displacement—presented its recommendations. As is to be expected from a highly technical UNFCCC entity, the recommendations of the Task Force are highly technical, and include proposals for extending the Task Force; providing information on intended financial support; creating synergies with other areas of the work plan; and upporting developing countries in integrating displacement concerns into their National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) and Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the UNFCCC. Despite events from the UNFCCC both setting the scene for and closing the chapter, a marked difference from the first fifteen episodes detailed in the second chapter is that the UNFCCC is much less the focus of policy making, with other policy fora also becoming important and actors that are new to the area creating new spaces for discussion.

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to explore Chagossians' recollections of forced displacement, their reformulations of the homeland, their challenging lives in exile, their experiences of onward migration, and their attempts to make home in successive locations. It then details the Chagossians' forced displacement from the Chagos Archipelago and the onward migration to the UK. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter continues Chapter 5's ethnographic focus on the Chagossian community in Crawley, while revisiting the themes of home and homeland explored in Part II. It starts by revisiting debates amongst scholars of migration and displacement about the distinction between ‘forced displacement’ and ‘voluntary migration’. It asks to what extent Chagossians contrast their forced displacement from Chagos to Mauritius with their onward migration from Mauritius to the UK. The data reveal that experiences of onward migration to the UK and settlement in Crawley have challenged Chagossians' preconceptions of Britons and of life in the UK, and subtly altered their assessments of Mauritians and life in Mauritius. Next, the chapter examines the degree to which experiences of migration and settlement in the UK and changing visions of the future are delineated according to stage in the life course. It concludes that, despite very different experience of forced displacement and onward migration, claims of a desire to return to Mauritius take much the same form amongst migrant Chagossians in Crawley as claims of a desire to return to Chagos take amongst displaced Chagos islanders in Mauritius.

This chapter situates the protection of displaced persons in the broader challenge of protection of civilians, considering the place that displacement occupies in the protection agenda of the Security Council. It examines the protection that international law affords civilians who are at risk of, or experiencing, displacement in situations of armed conflict. The analysis presented focuses on three elements: (a) protection against the act of forced displacement; (b) protection when displaced, both cross-border and through internal displacement; and (c) safe and sustainable solutions to displacement. The legal analysis is illustrated by reference to actual situations of displacement in contemporary conflicts.

Although most forcibly displaced persons are legal nationals of a state, they lack functioning citizenship with their governments. In fact, their governments are often responsible for the human rights abuses and conflicts that prompted their displacement to begin with. While some protections under international law are meant to fill the gaps created by these broken ties, in reality the displaced suffer widespread human rights abuses in the absence of a reliable state duty-bearer. Anti–Syrian refugee sentiments in Europe, refugee detention in Australia, and the stubborn refusal to acknowledge many “illegal immigrants” as asylum-seekers in North America are just a few examples of the severe challenges to basic human rights the forcibly displaced face in the absence of functioning citizenship. The inadequacies of refugee rights, including the false assumption that displacement is anything less than normal in our current system, lead to glaring denials of the rights to place and purpose for the displaced.

Chapter 6 discusses the relationships of refugees from the front-line towns to the bombarded communities they left behind. It outlines the size of the refugee populations from the front-line towns, and maps their destinations within the French interior. It demonstrates that most refugees from the front-line towns experienced forced displacement alongside others from their home communities, and that this geography of displacement allowed refugees to remain socially, emotionally, and imaginatively involved in their bombarded home communities. In this way, refugees remained members of the front-line communities, even while displaced. To date, the refugee history of the First World War has focused on the attitudes of the state and host communities in the interior towards refugees. This chapter, in contrast, makes a significant contribution to the historiography by focusing on the attitudes and actions of refugees themselves. Using refugee newspapers, diaries, and a previously unknown collection of letters, it argues that refugees from the front-line towns were not merely the passive recipients of state and charitable aid, but could actively shape the conditions of their exile by remaining invested in their abandoned home towns and making appeals based on their French citizenship.

We could cite an endless list of countries, peoples, and languages that are menaced by forced displacement and even disappearance before having been documented. Minority cultures and languages in particular are threatened by mightier neighbors and industrialized nations. With technical improvements and mechanical achievements, people are pushed into new, unwanted situations. This chapter deals with the case of the minority culture and language of the Egyptian Nubians investigated in the 1960s before their evacuation. In this fieldwork, anthropology could only be applied as a humanitarian discipline, aiming at the safeguarding of the—then present—and last stage of an ancient culture.

The chapter discusses the urgent need to develop comprehensive legal responses to the displacement of people caused by the effects of climate change. Although vast numbers are expected to be displaced around the world, any international legal instrument does not specifically recognize their situation. The chapter emphasizes the devastating effects of such events on the human rights of those affected and stresses the need for international legal recognition of displaced people. The case studies discuss the effects of climate change on island communities, river deltas, and accelerated desertification and other soil degradation in the Asia Pacific. Finding solutions, agreeing on binding legal instruments to grant protection, and sharing relevant responsibilities is crucial. The significant challenges of such an endeavour must not be underestimated, due to widely differing political interests within the international community as well as the complexity of the problems and their causes.

The conclusion draws the various arguments of the book together, and makes a final case for the importance of the topic. It reaffirms how the book has presented an alternative picture of the Western Front—one that is urban rather than rural, and one where the soldiers are not the sole inhabitants of the battlefield, but share it with civilians. It discusses how the historiography of the First World War has demonstrated that the conflict ‘militarized’ civilian identities. But it also points out that, up until now, there has been little acknowledgement of how this was a variable process, with some civilians militarized to a far greater extent than others. The conclusion points to the wide-ranging social impacts of the experiences studied in this book. Direct encounters with military violence, and especially the traumatic experiences of artillery bombardment, military occupation, and forced displacement threatened the integrity of France’s front-line communities. War scattered communities and destroyed the physical spaces they inhabited, strained social and family bonds, generated considerable material hardships, and killed and wounded thousands of civilians. And yet, despite these intense and prolonged physical assaults on local communities, a sense of community identity remained intact throughout the war, and was of crucial importance for how civilians navigated the pressures of life in the battle zones. War did not, in other words, destroy the front-line communities, but transformed them, and shaped the sense of belonging felt by civilians.

There has been a sharp increase in forced displacement in recent decades, particularly of urban refugees who comprise 60% of refugees worldwide. Urban refugees are largely concentrated in the developing world. Non-recognition of their status as refugees in countries of asylum contributes to unique legal, social, and material precarity which engenders a range of protection challenges, including health risks. This chapter provides an operational definition for urban refugees and discuss their unique health risks within the legal and policy contexts they live in, their access to health care, and the challenges experienced by host countries grappling with resource constraints and stretched health-care systems.

This introductory note briefly analyzes four important decisions issued by the Inter-American Court in 2013: a judgment reviewing a criminal system in Argentina that allowed persons to be subject to life imprisonment for felonies committed during their childhood; a case referring to an operation carried out by paramilitary groups along with state armed forces that led to human rights violations to the detriment of an afro-descendant community in Colombia; a judgment analyzing the principle of non-refoulment, the duties of states that receive requests for asylum, particularly when children are involved; and a judgment referring to an enforced disappearance in Peru, where state authorities had issued a document affirming that an individual had been freed. These cases demonstrate the Court’s role in developing legal standards for the safeguarding of human rights in the region.