The Global Displacement Crisis

One percent of the world population is currently displaced, a number that has doubled since 2010. While most of the news, policy, funding, and academic attention to this “global displacement crisis” focuses on refugees entering Europe and the United States, 85% of global refugees are hosted in developing countries. Out of 79.5 million total forcibly displaced persons in the world in 2019, 45.7 million were internally displaced persons (IDPs, i.e., those who left their homes but never crossed a national border). What is driving this increase in displacement and what are the consequences for communities who host refugees or IDPs?  In this talk, Tom O'Mealia, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University, will discuss macro trends in global displacement, focusing on who becomes displaced and where they go. He will discuss some of his research on the consequences of hosting refugees and IDPs and the policy responses to this global displacement crisis.

Tom O'Mealia is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University, where he is based at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the TH Chan School of Public Health. He conducts interdisciplinary research that explains the political economy of conflict and political violence, human security in contemporary civil wars, accountability processes after conflict, and international policy responses to humanitarian crises. Most of his research combines original surveys and observational data collected through extensive fieldwork in sub-Saharan Africa (in particular in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya). In addition to his academic research, he occasionally serves as an evaluation consultant for UN agencies. Tom received his BA, MA, and PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan.

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