Examining Intra-state Displacement and Its Impact

When a flood swallows a village in Assam, when communal violence forces families out of their homes in Manipur, or when a new dam submerges entire districts, the people who flee often have nowhere to go but elsewhere within their own country. They are not refugees in the legal sense, because they never cross an international border. They are internally displaced persons, or IDPs, and they form one of the largest yet least legally protected categories of forced migrants in the world. Understanding intra-state displacement is essential for anyone studying international relations, because it sits at the uncomfortable intersection of national sovereignty, human rights, and humanitarian responsibility.

What is intra-state displacement?
The scale of the problem
Why IDPs are not refugees: the protection gap
Refugees have a dedicated legal regime
IDPs fall into a legal vacuum
The role of the United Nations and other actors
Africa’s binding experiment
What causes internal displacement?
Conflict and violence
Natural and human-made disasters
Development projects
The Indian response and its limitations
Why this matters for international relations

What is intra-state displacement?

Intra-state displacement refers to the forced movement of people within the borders of their own country. The people affected by it become internally displaced persons. According to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, IDPs are persons who have been forced or obliged to flee their homes to avoid armed conflict, generalized violence, human rights violations, or natural and human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border.

That final clause is the entire point. The defining feature of an IDP is geographic: they remain inside their own country. This single fact separates them legally and practically from refugees, who by definition have crossed into another state. A family fleeing flooding in Bihar to a relief camp in the same district is internally displaced. A family fleeing persecution from India into Bangladesh would be a refugee. The trauma may be identical, but the legal consequences are not.

The scale of the problem

Internal displacement is not a marginal issue. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), a record 83.4 million people were living in internal displacement at the end of 2024, the highest figure ever recorded and more than double the number from just six years earlier. Conflict and violence accounted for the bulk of this total, while disasters drove a record number of new displacements in a single year. To put it in perspective, the global IDP population is now roughly equivalent to the entire population of Germany.

Why IDPs are not refugees: the protection gap

The distinction between IDPs and refugees is more than academic. It determines who is legally responsible for protecting these people and what assistance they can claim.

Refugees have a dedicated legal regime

Refugees are protected by a well-established international framework, primarily the 1951 Refugee Convention and the agency mandated to oversee it, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Once a person crosses an international border fleeing persecution, they become a concern of the international community. States that host them are bound by treaty obligations, and UNHCR works to ensure their protection and to find durable solutions.

IDPs fall into a legal vacuum

IDPs enjoy no such dedicated international treaty. Because they remain inside their own country, they technically retain all the rights of ordinary citizens, which means national authorities hold the primary responsibility to protect them and support solutions for their situation. The Guiding Principles describe who IDPs are, but they are deliberately a descriptive framework rather than a binding legal instrument. They do not confer any special legal status.

This creates what scholars call a protection gap. As an analysis published by the International Committee of the Red Cross notes, the situation of IDPs differs sharply from that of refugees because the very state expected to protect them may itself be responsible for their displacement in the first place. When a government drives people from their homes, expecting that same government to be their primary protector is, at best, optimistic. The present international system remains largely ad hoc, with no single organization holding a global mandate to protect and assist the internally displaced.

The role of the United Nations and other actors

If no agency has exclusive responsibility for IDPs, who actually helps them? In practice, the response is shared and improvised. UNHCR has progressively expanded its involvement with IDPs over the decades, even though its original mandate was confined to refugees. Other UN bodies, including the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the International Organization for Migration, UNICEF, and the World Food Programme, contribute through a cluster-based coordination system.

Yet this assistance is supplementary, not primary. The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, presented to the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1998, were a landmark precisely because they were the first international standards to identify both the rights of the internally displaced and the obligations of governments toward them. The 30 principles cover protection before, during, and after displacement, including humanitarian assistance and the right to return. But they remain soft law, meaning governments are encouraged rather than legally compelled to follow them.

Africa’s binding experiment

One region has gone further. The African Union adopted the Kampala Convention in 2009, which entered into force in 2012 as the world’s first and only binding, continent-wide treaty for protecting people displaced within their own borders. It transformed the soft law of the Guiding Principles into hard law, articulating concrete obligations for states, the African Union, international organizations, and even armed groups and non-state actors. The Convention reframes sovereignty as a positive responsibility for the welfare of citizens, not merely a shield against outside interference. Its existence proves that a tailored legal instrument for IDPs is possible, though significant gaps in implementation remain, which is why Africa still hosts a large share of the world’s displaced.

What causes internal displacement?

Internal displacement generally springs from three broad sources, and India offers a clear example of all three operating simultaneously.

Conflict and violence

Armed conflict, insurgency, ethnic clashes, and communal violence remain the leading global drivers of displacement. In India, the picture is shaped by insurgencies and ethnic tensions in the northeastern states and by the long-running situation in Jammu and Kashmir. The exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley in 1990 is among the most cited episodes of conflict-induced displacement in the country. More recently, the ethnic violence in Manipur in 2023 triggered roughly 67,000 displacements, the highest number caused by conflict and violence in India in years.

Natural and human-made disasters

Floods, cyclones, earthquakes, and droughts displace huge numbers of people, often temporarily but sometimes permanently. India, with its long coastline and monsoon-dependent geography, regularly records some of the highest disaster displacement figures in South Asia. Pre-emptive evacuations ahead of cyclones in Odisha and West Bengal, for instance, save lives but still uproot communities. Disaster-induced displacement remains one of the most visible and frequent forms of internal displacement in the country.

Development projects

This category is especially significant in the Indian context and is often overlooked in international discussions because it does not fit neatly into the UN definition. To achieve rapid economic growth, India has built dams, mines, highways, power plants, and entire new cities, all of which require large-scale land acquisition and the relocation of people. Estimates of the affected population are staggering. According to figures cited in the journal Forced Migration Review, the Indian Social Institute places the number of people displaced by development projects at around 21.3 million, while other estimates run even higher. The IOM has noted that experts estimate 60 to 70 million people may have been displaced by development projects in India since 1950.

This raises a pointed question that scholars have long debated: is development-induced displacement an internal affair or an international human rights issue? Because governments are often the very agents of this displacement, they tend to resist outside scrutiny, fiercely guarding the principle of national sovereignty. The deafening silence around development-displaced persons, who frequently receive little international attention, illustrates how the protection gap widens when the state itself is the cause.

The Indian response and its limitations

India does not have a single, comprehensive national law specifically addressing internally displaced persons. Responses tend to be fragmented across central and state governments and vary enormously depending on the cause of displacement.

One persistent difficulty is simply counting. As researchers have observed, estimating the number of IDPs in India is genuinely problematic because the country lacks a central authority responsible for coordinating displacement data, and political sensitivities at the state level can discourage the release of accurate figures. This is why estimates range so wildly, from a few hundred thousand conflict-induced IDPs to tens of millions when development displacement is included.

The quality of assistance is another concern. Reports have repeatedly documented that IDPs in camps, particularly in the northeast, often live in deplorable conditions, with assistance from state governments and NGOs described as insufficient and sporadic. Compensation for those displaced by development has historically favored inadequate cash payments over the more sustainable land-for-land approach, leaving many displaced families economically worse off than before.

Why this matters for international relations

Intra-state displacement is a textbook illustration of the tension between two principles that international relations students grapple with constantly: state sovereignty and the international protection of human rights. When a state cannot or will not protect its own displaced citizens, the international community faces a dilemma. Intervening risks violating sovereignty, while inaction risks abandoning millions of vulnerable people. The idea, advanced by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, that sovereignty carries responsibilities toward citizens rather than being an absolute right, lies at the heart of how the world is slowly trying to address this gap.

The story of IDPs is therefore not just about humanitarian aid. It is about how the international system defines responsibility, where the line between domestic and international concern should fall, and whether the descriptive consensus of the Guiding Principles can ever evolve into the kind of binding protection that refugees already enjoy.

What do you think? Should the international community develop a binding global treaty to protect internally displaced persons, even if it means a degree of intrusion into national sovereignty? And given that development projects have displaced more people in India than conflict or disasters combined, should development-induced displacement be formally recognized within the international IDP framework?

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Table of Contents

What is intra-state displacement? 🔗

The scale of the problem 🔗

Why IDPs are not refugees: the protection gap 🔗

Refugees have a dedicated legal regime 🔗

IDPs fall into a legal vacuum 🔗

The role of the United Nations and other actors 🔗

Africa’s binding experiment 🔗

What causes internal displacement? 🔗

Conflict and violence 🔗

Natural and human-made disasters 🔗

Development projects 🔗

The Indian response and its limitations 🔗

Why this matters for international relations 🔗