Laker, Frederick (2022). Rethinking Internal Displacement. Geo-political Games, Fragile States and the Relief Industry. New York: Berghahn Books. 298 pp. (in Studi Emigrazione, LX, n. 230, 2023 – ISSN 0039-2936).

Internal displacement has created an unprecedent challenge for the international community. As former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon already stated in 2013, overcrowded relief camps are arguably «the most significant humanitarian challenge that we face». To date, the situation has not improved with the global number of internally displaced people (IDPs) reaching an all-time high of 59.1 million people at the end of 2021. Of these, 53.2 million were displaced
due to conflict and violence while 5.9 million from disaster. Furthermore, preliminary estimates show that the number of people displaced by conflict, violence and disasters continued to reach new levels in 2022 (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre). Although awareness of the global crisis of internal displacement has grown, the number of IDPs due to conflict has more than doubled since 1998 and equally relevant is the increasing duration of individual instances of displacement.
IDPs have a similar need for protection as cross-border refugees, but they are not entitled to the same degree of legal protection. Prior to the United Nations published its Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement in 1998, the debate over the international law regime as it relates to IDPs saw the attempt to extend to IDPs similar protection`s as those accorded to refugees. It had been argued that such a development in international law is unnecessary and undesirable due also to negative consequences on refugees such as reinforcing non-entrée policies (M. Barutciski, Tensions between the refugee concept and the IDP debate, Forced Migration Review, 3, 1998: 11-14; B. Rutinwa, How tense is the tension between the refugee concept and the IDP debate?, Forced Migration Review, 4, 1999: 29-35).

Recently, some authors investigated the spatial diffusion of conflict within a state’s borders and what role internal displacement plays within such circumstances (H. Bohnet – F. Cottier – S. Hug, Conflict-induced IDPs and the Spread of Conflict, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 62, 4, 2018: 691-716). They argue that a lack of international aid tasked with the protection of IDPs has led to a situation where IDPs often face severe protection gaps, a dearth of economic and political opportu-
nities, and therefore are likely to engage in violence to seek to change their livelihood, which then may inadvertently reinforce the spiral of conflict. Therefore, ensuring effective protection and assistance to IDPs is a crucial step towards limiting IDP militarization and the spread of conflict. With regard to the structural legal and humanitarian injustices from which IDPs suffer as a result of often arbitrary distinctions between them and refugees in international law, some argue that it is precisely because IDPs lack international legal protections that their rights and needs are frequently overlooked and met with indifference and lack of sufficient humanitarian response from the United Nations (N. Schimmel, Trapped by Sovereignty: The Fate of Internally Displaced Persons and Their Lack of Equal Human Rights Protection under International Law, World Affairs, 185, 3, 2022: 500-529) To other scholars, the crisis of IDPs appears to be not just characterized by neglected and abandoned people in need of help but also dramatically shaping the trajectory and dynamics of conflicts at both domestic and
international levels. In this vein, the book of Federick Laker, PhD, Lecturer in International Relations at King’s College London, aims to «change the analytical gaze» to «advance our understanding» of the history, structure and impact of the principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures of the IDP legal protection mechanisms. In the first part of the book, Laker traces the history of the IDP regime documenting its origins from 1930 to 1950 as an outcome of the geo-political importance of refugees in the bi-polar standoff between the great powers. IDPs were largely overshadowed by the wider Cold War and treated as an internal issue of
state sovereignty with no need for a dedicated international regime until they became a «sudden» international concern in the 1980s (Chapter 1). Laker therein distances himself from the main interpretation that sees the end of the Cold War as the major cause for «the sudden rise of internal displacement» (p. 55). Instead, Laker provides an overarching picture of multiple actors, events and global processes, occurring simultaneously, that contributed to the IDP conceptualization (Chapter 2) through a restructuration of knowledge, numbers, and labels that created a bureaucratic category to apply to citizens «trapped» within their country, as well as through a restructuration of the concept of sovereignty (see the Responsibility to Protect) «in order to cradle IDP policy and practice» (p. 80). According to Laker a «seismic normative shift has occurred in the international system, in which a new global regime designed to protect people displaced within their borders has been established» (Chapter 3). The emergence of the IDP crisis no longer appears to be a «spontaneous and natural phenomenon. Instead, it becomes a project designed to restrict and nullify the authority of the 1951 Refugee Convention, in order to remove the flow of refugees from the Global South into the Global North» (p. 39).

The analysis then focuses on how refugee norms were carefully redesigned, in what the author defines an «essentially cloning exercise» (p. 99), to emerge as IDP norms that could «eclipse» the 1951 Convention and contain refugees. The 1998 UN Guiding Principles, therefore, were not protecting IDPs as IDPs, but instead «diluting the citizenship status of citizens and relabelling them ‘internally displaced persons’, thereby weakening the bond with the state, but giving the so-called international community the power to intervene to protect this new legal category of persons robbed of their citizenship» (p. 102, Chapter 4).
In the second part of the book, Laker critically analyses the structure of the IDP regime that, in the first instance, «depoliticized and technicised internal displacement, while at the same time reproducing existing power structures of Western paternalism» that justify the need for humanitarian governance, humanitarian privileges and the control of destitute masses through the establishment of large-scale protection structures for indefinite periods. Therefore, this new regime has been a «mechanism for accommodating a series of interests and prerogatives at three levels: a geo-political game; fragile states and the relief industry». The author employs a critical discourse analysis to show how the various institutional actors and geo-political objectives have come to structure «systems that purport to protect thousands of people within their own borders» (p. 125) and culminate in «entrapping people in conditions of aid dependency that can
create a permanent state of relief» (p.137), (Chapter 5). In the last part of the volume, Laker observes the impact of the IDP regime – both at the macro and micro level – which creates «a space of alternate social ordering», alters the dynamics of conflict and establishes «a lucrative humanitarian economy»
(p. 143). The state of Uganda is the case study used by the author – who worked within the displacement camps in the North – to address the impact of the IDP regime. During his time in the country – being the first to develop a national policy for internally displaced persons in 2004; one of the first to implement the UN Cluster Approach, and the country that launched the African Union IDP Kampala Convention in 2009 –, Laker witnessed the conditions of people living in
camps. At the macro-level, Laker first traces how a «fragile state» like Uganda was able to manipulate the IDP regime to control the population and secure its interests (Chapter 6). Then the author investigates the micro-level power dynamics within the IDP camps in Northern Uganda. Appling the Foucauldian concept of Heterotopia, which seeks to expose how power is instilled into physical space, the author pictures how specific power relations are established and orchestrated as well as how the camps are themselves instrumental in creating new structures of power (Chapter 7). The spatial regulation of the IDP camp therefore was not simply about rescuing people from untold suffering, but far more fundamentally it was about the «creation of a separate and permanent world, which could absorb and sustain an indefinite humanitarian economy that guaranteed countless privileges and upheld the unceasing trepidations of a fragile state» (Chapter 8). For this structural configuration of IDPs and space arose a series of vicious cycles that facilitate conditions of violence, starvation, disease, and morbidity (Chapter 9).

Although the book does not have the intention to denounce the noble effort of the humanitarian community, it is indeed highly critical, bordering on conspiracy, of the operate of international organizations, especially the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) whose evolution is a common thread throughout the volume. However, apparently the author leaves it to others to come up with ideas and proposals on how to rethink internal displacement. It would certainly have been useful, precisely to provoke a critical debate on the subject, to close the volume with a few action points.

Veronica De Sanctis