CHAPTER 3: LITERATURE REVIEW
3.2 Internal displacements-definitions, concepts and perspectives
It is a truism that traditionally Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) have not been given the requisite attention in the international platform and agenda. Logically, interest has been on the
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more common refuges (Holms ibid). This is in spite of the observation that there are approximately 26 million Internally Displaced Persons globally and these are highly pronounced in 50 countries across the world (Deng 2001, Borton et al 2005, Birkland 2009). It has actually been observed that the number of IDPs since the mid-1990s has outstripped the number of people who seek shelter outside their own borders (Kalin and Williams 2010). This background has obviously necessitated an increased interest in the study of the challenges confronting Internally Displaced persons at the global scale. The dilemma of these Internally Displaced Persons from the international community’s standpoint is that they are within the domestic jurisdiction and become different from the way the refugees who cross international borders are treated and protected (Hager 2006). In the Zimbabwean experience, issues of sovereignty and non-interference in domestic matters will inevitably come to the fore and such scapegoating means the internally displaced and vulnerable communities like the Tokwe Mukosi community escape the much needed international attention and recognition (see Cohen and Deng 1998, Tibaijuka 2005, Hammar 2008). As observed by Chaudhry (2010), such scapegoating and lack of political will on the part of governments poses one of the greatest obstacles in the endeavor to provide protection for the IDPs. In addition, there was no international instrument in place to deal with the challenges confronting IDPs at that time.
Contrary to the aforementioned position, in recent times however, there has been a remarkable awareness of the global nature of the crisis confronting Internally Displaced Persons. This growing interest in the plight of Internally Displaced Persons came to light in the early 1990s.
The interest was reinforced by the United Nations Guiding principles on IDPs, which were formulated by the United Nations General Assembly in 1998. These guiding principles have continued to receive wide spread support regardless of the fact that they are not binding. What this means is that the displaced communities have no recourse internationally if their rights have been violated (Kalin and Williams ibid).
Despite the said growing interest in IDPs the serious challenge when attempting to conceptualize it is that the concept is polemical. There is no consensus among the academics, researchers, policy makers and the humanitarian community on what constitutes an Internally Displaced
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Person. Two aspects are however central in the conceptualization of the concept in question. The first one is the involuntary nature of the movement and the second one is that they do not cross their national border (United Nations Commission on Human Rights 1996). Given this background in 1992 the United Nations Secretary General in Deng (1995) went on to define Internally Displaced Persons as,
“Persons or a group of persons who have been forced to flee their homes suddenly or unexpectedly in large numbers as a result of armed conflict, internal strife, systematic violations of human rights or natural or manmade disaster and who are within the territory of their own country”pge 49.
Conceptualizing Internally Displaced Persons this way maybe attractive but it raises a number of serious concerns. In the first place defining them in relation to the temporal and numerical elements means people who will be displaced over a long period of time maybe glossed over.
This is graphic when one looks at the Tokwe Mukosi experience where villagers have been moved in three phases and many more will be moved in the next few years to pave way for the dam project and the highly anticipated Agro town. It is also practically unsound to believe that displaced persons will almost always be displaced in large numbers. In actual fact the movement can be done in groups and at times it can be an individual experience (see Cohen 2004, Money ibid). In addition to these glaring shortcomings, it is also important to note that defining IDPs as persons confined to the territory of their own country is also problematic because this definition fails to account for the possibility of a sudden border change, thereby missing out on other people who might need protection (Malinowski et al 2016).
A more sophisticated definition of IDPs which aims at correcting the inadequacies of the earlier definition became imperative and it is actually contained in the United Nations Guiding Principles on Internally Displaced Persons of 1998. Herein they are defined as,
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“Persons or groups of persons who have been forced to or obliged to flee or leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human made disasters and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border.”
See Cohen (2004) pge 464.
This definition retains most of the underlying causes of displacement raised in the original definition, but it is richer and much more flexible. What this entails is that the causes of displacement can now vary depending on the context. It opened room for the subjective understanding of the causes of internal displacement, which may help to accommodate persons displaced by development projects like dam projects in the context of this study, who have hitherto been overlooked in literature on IDPs. It should however be underscored that in as much as there has been a notable zest to accommodate persons who have previously been excluded in the original definition of IDPs, statistics on IDPs have worryingly focused on people displaced by conflict and human rights violations (Money ibid, International Committee of the Red Cross 2009). What this implies is that development induced displacements remain a dark figure in the global statistics on internal displacement. The persons displaced by developmental projects have therefore become the ‘Invisibly Displaced Persons’ (IDPs) as opposed to Internally Displaced Persons (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre 2008).
3.3 Development problematic-The dilemmas of defining and conceptualizing