Since the outbreak of the Syrian conflict close to one decade ago (2011-present), more than one quarter of its population have fled the country to neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey. Another 25% of the population has been internally displaced. By the conflict’s seventh year, more than 12 million Syrians were forcibly displaced, half of which were now refugees, and the other half of which became internally displaced (IDPs). Lebanon hosts the largest proportion of refugees compared to its population worldwide, with an estimated 1.5 million refugees between those registered and unregistered. IDPs from Syria are among the world’s most vulnerable people. Unlike Syrian refugees in neighboring countries, these IDPs have not crossed an international border to receive the humanitarian protection they need, but have remained inside Syria as the conflict goes on. Even though they have fled from the same conflict, IDPs in Syria remain under the protection of the Syrian government. As citizens, though they do not have access to their rights or any form of protection from their government, they are considered entitled to their rights and protection under both human rights and international humanitarian law, and thus have a different legal standing to refugees from Syria who reside in Lebanon. Interestingly, both these populations (refugees and IDPs) are assisted by UNHCR.
The paper discusses the two types of displacement the Syrian population has experienced (across borders and internally) through a comparative approach. The paper intends to challenge the notions of protection and displacement, through shedding light on the Syrian case, while also discussing definitions of refugee and IDP in contemporary conflicts and how these “labels” affect access to labor, citizenship, mobility and rights for the same population.
Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab (she/her) is a Canadian-Lebanese expert in Migration, Gender and Conflict Studies. Dr. Diab is the Director of the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University, where she also serves as an Assistant Professor of Migration Studies at the Department of Social and Education Sciences. She is a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University, a Global Fellow at Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies, a Scholar in Forced Displacement at University of Ottawa’s Human Rights Research and Education Centre, and the Lead of the Global Research Network’s ‘Gender and Migration Research Group.
This paper was written by the author during her Summer Fellowship on Internal Displacement at the Internal Displacement Research Programme at the Refugee Law Initiative. The Fellowship was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, on behalf of the UKRI Global Challenge Research Fund, as part of the funded project “Interdisciplinary Network on Internal Displacement, Conflict and Protection” (AH/T005351/1).
