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Today, there are over 40 million conflict-induced internally displaced persons (IDPs) globally, almost double the number of refugees. Yet, IDPs are protected only by the soft-law Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement at the global level. Instead of a dedicated international organization, IDPs receive protection and assistance only through the UN's cluster approach. Orchard argues that while an international IDP protection regime exists, many aspects of it are informal, with IDP issues bound up in a humanitarian regime complex that divides the mandates of key organizations and even the question of IDP status itself. While the Guiding Principles mark an important step forward, implementation of laws and policies based on them at the domestic level remains haphazard. Action at the international level similarly reflects an all-too-often ad hoc approach to IDP issues. Through an in-depth examination of IDP efforts at the international level and across the forty states which have adopted IDP laws and policies, Orchard argues that while progress has been made, new and greater monitoring and accountability mechanisms at both the domestic and international levels are critical. This work will be valuable to scholars, students, and practitioners of forced migration, international relations theory, and the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

The concept of 'safe areas' emerged in the early 1990s as a way of responding to increasing displacement triggered by internal conflicts. As a form of protection, their record was mixed—for every success like northern Iraq in 1991, there was a failure like the collapse of the Srebrenica safe area in 1995. But why did the safe area concept itself emerge at this time? Traditionally, safe areas were akin to humanitarian spaces anchored in consent. The shift in the early 1990s was to replace consent with an international military presence, including military forces and peacekeepers. This article argues that this shift was only possible because of two critical changes which occurred within the United Nations: the recognition that civilian protection represented an international problem and the UN Security Council broadening how it interpreted the notion of 'threats to international peace and security' to include issues such as forced migrant flows.

Forcible displacement can constitute a mass atrocity crime. This is something that is considered within the non-binding Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. Efforts to implement the Guiding Principles at the regional level suggest one path to implement stronger legal protections for internally displaced persons (idps), in particular, against mass atrocity crimes. These regional processes, however, can vary in remarkable ways. In the African Union, the Kampala Convention has brought the Guiding Principles and protections against mass atrocity crimes directed at idps into regional hard law; it also includes robust implementation and enforcement mechanisms. At this stage, however, these mechanisms remain anticipatory rather than effective; consequently international assistance will be vital to entrench the rights anchored in the Convention. By contrast, asean has introduced no overt protections for idps. However, its developing legal human rights framework through the asean Declaration of Human Rights, coupled with the Association's response to the Rohingya idp crisis in Myanmar, suggests that a policy-focused change, while incremental, may be happening.