In collaboration with the American University in Dubai (AUD)
September 2016 – February 2018
Internal displacement is a major humanitarian and security issue in the world. Contrary to general belief, there are far more ‘internally displaced persons’ (IDPs) than refugees in the world today. According to figures released by UNHCR, 65.3 million people were displaced in 2015, 21.3 million of them were refugees while 44 million of them remained internally displaced. The scale of the problem is challenging the capacity of humanitarian organisations and governments to respond to the needs of IDPs.
This project focuses on how the special territorial and governance status of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan), often considered as a state-like entity, influence the humanitarian response to IDPs in this region. It aims to understand the specific implications of Iraqi Kurdistan’s status examining the national and international response to the displacement crisis and the socio-political structure of the region.
Assessing the scale of the crisis is not easy, as internal displacement in not a new issue in Iraqi Kurdistan and IDPs are constantly on the move. According to the International Organisation for Migration, as of April 2016, over 3.3 million Iraqis were estimated to be internally displaced, of whom 1 million were located in Iraqi Kurdistan. The sheer size of the IDPs crisis in Iraqi Kurdistan is often not on the international agenda due to more emphasis on the conflict in Syria and other pressing IDPs crises elsewhere in the world. Moreover, Iraqi Kurdistan has not been receiving its share of the national budget from Baghdad due to tensions between the Kurdish and Iraqi governments.
These circumstances place enormous pressure on Iraqi Kurdistan’s economic resources and infrastructure and pose major challenges for the combined efforts of international organisations, the KRG and local NGOs to successfully manage the constantly growing humanitarian crisis in the region. In particular, significant challenges include addressing the safety, housing, employment and health-related needs of the displaced communities. Furthermore, the crisis will have ethno-political and demographic repercussions for the Kurdish region in the long term. Iraqi Kurdistan provides a unique case study to understand how policies on the management of IDPs, provision for protection and relief, and collaboration between national, international and local actors, differ in regions with autonomous sovereignty. It will analyse the short-term and long-term socio-political repercussions of displacement for Iraq as well as for the autonomous region of Kurdistan.
Research Team
Dr Zeynep Kaya is Research Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and Research Officer at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security. She completed her PhD in International Relations at LSE. Her most recent collaborative project looked at how international-local interaction shapes gender norm compliance in Iraqi Kurdistan and was completed in 2016. Zeynep is interested in internal displacement, gender and the implementation of the WPS agenda in Iraq specifically, and in the international politics of the Middle East with a focus on Turkey, Iraq, Syria and the Kurds in general.
Dr Deniz Gökalp is Associate Professor of Social Sciences at the American University in Dubai. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. She was awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship with the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Syracuse University, where she led Maxwell School’s “Arab Leaders for Democracy Fellows Program” for a year. Focusing on Iraq and the Levant region, her current research deals with issues of political violence, gender hierarchies and displacement.
Consultant
Nesreen Barwari is a Lecturer and researcher of Governance and Urban Planning, in the College of Spatial Planning and Applied Sciences of University of Duhok, Iraq. Before pursuing an academic career, she was a Minister at the national and the regional level in Iraq leading reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and Iraq after regime change in 2003. Nesreen has extensive experiences in the humanitarian relief field working with various UN agencies addressing the needs of the returnees and internally displaced people in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.