Internal displacement monitoring is the practice of tracking internally displaced persons (IDPs)—individuals who have been forced to leave their homes due to armed conflict, generalised violence, human rights violations, or natural and human-made disasters, but who have not crossed an international border. Unlike refugees, IDPs remain under the legal protection of their own government, which complicates both data collection and humanitarian response.
The principal global authority on this work is the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), established in 1998 by the Norwegian Refugee Council at the request of the UN. IDMC publishes the annual Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID), which compiles country-level figures on new displacements and total stocks of IDPs. Its methodology distinguishes between conflict-induced and disaster-induced displacement, and between flow data (new displacements in a given year) and stock data (people living in displacement at year-end).
Monitoring draws on a mix of sources: government statistics, UN agency reporting (notably UNHCR and OCHA), the IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM), NGO field assessments, satellite imagery, and media monitoring. Each source presents trade-offs between coverage, timeliness, and verification.
The normative framework underpinning this work is the 1998 UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, drafted under the leadership of Francis Deng, and at the regional level the Kampala Convention (the African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance of IDPs in Africa), adopted in 2009 and entered into force in 2012.
Persistent challenges include:
- Undercounting in areas inaccessible to monitors
- Double-counting when people are displaced multiple times
- Determining when displacement has ended (durable solutions)
- Political sensitivities, since high IDP figures can embarrass host governments
For MUN delegates and researchers, IDMC's datasets are typically the most cited baseline, often cross-referenced with UNHCR's Global Trends report for the broader forced displacement picture.
Example
In its 2023 GRID report, IDMC recorded 71.1 million people living in internal displacement at the end of 2022, with Ukraine, Syria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo among the largest caseloads.
Frequently asked questions
IDPs remain inside their country of origin and fall under national jurisdiction, so monitoring relies more heavily on in-country actors and lacks the legal framework of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which applies only to those who cross borders.
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