JDC Literature Review
The JDC literature review highlights recent publications, academic scholarship, and thought leadership on issues relating to forced displacement. Our intention is to stimulate discussion, encourage the exchange of ideas, and support a ‘Community of Practice’.
Pakistan’s Urban Refugees: Steps towards Self-reliance
Sixty-eight percent of Afghan refugees in Pakistan live outside of camps, mostly in and around major urban centers. Almost all urban refugees in Pakistan are engaged in livelihood activities (transport business, gemstone trading, carpet production), making a...
Improving Information and Communication to Boost Inclusion and Self-reliance for Urban Refugees
A major obstacle to urban refugees’ self-reliance is that information and refugees do not easily ‘find’ each other. Refugees can become isolated and ‘lost’ in the urban environment, partly because they relocate frequently, making contact difficult to maintain, and...
Invisibility and Virality in Urban Shelter Response
The authors argue that humanitarian shelter responses should prioritize flexibility in order to accommodate diverse needs and capacities, particularly in the urban environment. The success of shelter assistance programs depends on: (1) flexibility (rather than...
Cities as Partners: The Case of Kampala
The authors (from the IRC and Kampala Capital City Authority) argue that more needs to be done to support city governments to address displacement. This means going beyond offering cities a seat at the table in policy discussions to investing in cities as equal...
The Path of Least Resistance? EU Cities and Locally Organized Resettlement
This article highlights efforts being made by some EU cities to locally organize resettlement for refugees. For example, in Italy, a project led by the church organization Community of Sant’ Egidio organizes the resettlement of 750 refugees each year through its...
Women Refugees, Leisure Space and the City Sarah Linn
The author highlights key findings of her research on Syrian refugees’ gendered experiences of mobility, security and public space in neighborhoods in the cities of Amman and Beirut. A number of intersecting structural and identity issues have combined to create...
Transformative Climate Action in Cities
This article unpacks how climate change will affect migrant populations living in cities (including refugees and IDPs), and how local governance and actions to combat the effects of climate change will address migrants’ vulnerability and support their inclusion in...
Forced Migration and Asylum Policy in the Developing World
Despite the fact that more than 84 percent of the world’s forced migrants are hosted in developing countries, refugee and asylum policies in developing countries are largely neglected in the academic literature, in part due to: (a) lack of data on migration policies...
Establishing Legal Identity for Displaced Syrians
Protracted conflict in Syria, the destruction or closure of civil registries, and complicated processes for issuing documents to refugees in host countries, have had a serious detrimental effect on many Syrians’ ability to prove their legal identity. In Syria, the...
A Citywide Approach in Urban Bangladesh
This article discusses the lessons learned from a citywide approach to reduce the prevalence of child labor and to protect working children’s rights in four cities in Bangladesh. World Vision targeted around 89,000 internally displaced children in four cities (Dhaka,...