Keyword Archives: Internal Displacement to Urban Areas

For more than 40 years, Colombians have been subject to chronic violence perpetrated by left-wing guerillas, paramilitaries, government forces, and drug cartels. In the past 20 years, an estimated four million people have been forced to leave their homes. Generally, the pattern of displacement has been within rural areas or to small administrative centers or larger cities. More recently, this pattern has changed, with displacement occurring within city limits or between city centers. This new pattern of intra-urban displacement has been notable since the conflict began to become ‘urbanized’ (primarily in Medellin and Bogota) from around 2000, leading to new forms of conflict and social tension in urban areas.

Effective monitoring of IDPs in Abidjan has been hampered by their invisibility. UNFPA and UNHCR carried out surveys in 2005 and 2007 respectively; however, these did not cover all of Abidjan and were not representative. We made Abidjan a case study to address the need for information about IDPs and because the city met our study’s criteria. Initial planning for the survey began in March 2007, and the survey was conducted in June 2007.

In recent decades Sudan’s North-South civil war and the conflict in Darfur have generated one of the largest internally displaced populations in the world. A large proportion of these IDPs is found in and around the capital, Khartoum. The Tufts-IDMC study of Khartoum was a pilot for our larger study and was carried out in 2007, two years after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. While the CPA raised hopes for the return of IDPs, continuing insecurity, lack of services in areas of return and doubts about the sustainability of the CPA, have slowed the pace of return.