IB Geography 1.2.3 Causes and Consequences of Forced Migration Notes

Coercion, Not Distance, Separates Forced Movement from Voluntary Movement

1. In voluntary migration the mover weighs push and pull factors and could reasonably have stayed.
2. In forced migration staying carries a serious risk of harm, so the realistic choice narrows to leaving.

1. An economic migrant moves mainly to raise income or opportunity, which is not a protected status in refugee law.
2. Real movements sit on a continuum rather than in two clean boxes.
   1. Drought can cut a farm income for three seasons before a family leaves, so the trigger is environmental and economic at once.
   2. Conflict often follows competition over water and grazing land, which puts political and environmental push factors in the same case.
3. Exposure describes physical position in the path of a flood, a storm or a front line.
4. Vulnerability describes how much harm that exposure causes.
   1. It is built by income, tenure, building standards, warning systems and legal status.
   2. Two households on the same floodplain lose different amounts because one rents an unreinforced single-storey house while the other owns a raised concrete one.

1. Displacement is therefore produced by social conditions as much as by the hazard event.

Refugee and Asylum Seeker Are Legal Statuses Defined by Persecution, Not by Border Crossing Alone

1. Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Refugee Convention covers a person outside their country of nationality with a well-founded fear of being persecuted.
2. The Convention lists five grounds, which are race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group and political opinion.
   1. Some short definitions list only four grounds, so check that membership of a particular social group is included.
3. The person must also be unable or unwilling to seek their own state's protection because of that fear.
4. The 1967 Protocol removed the Convention's time limit, which had restricted it to people displaced by events occurring before 1 January 1951.
   1. The Convention's European limit was never automatic, since Article 1B let each state declare whether it applied the Convention to events in Europe only or to events anywhere.
5. An asylum seeker has lodged a claim for that status which has not yet been decided.
   1. Status is recognised rather than granted, so somebody who meets the definition was already a refugee before the decision arrived.
6. Non-refoulement bars a state from returning a person to a place where they face persecution or serious harm.
7. Two regional instruments define a refugee more broadly than the 1951 Convention does.
   1. The 1969 OAU Convention, in force since 1974, adds people compelled to leave by external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order.
   2. The 1984 Cartagena Declaration adds generalised violence, internal conflicts and massive human rights violations, although it is not binding.

Internal Displacement Is the Larger Category and It Stays Inside the State

1. The 1998 Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement describe IDPs as people forced or obliged to flee their homes by armed conflict, generalised violence, human rights violations or natural or human-made disasters.
2. The defining clause is that they have not crossed an internationally recognised state border.
3. The Guiding Principles are not a treaty, so they carry no binding force of their own.
4. The 1951 Convention does not apply to IDPs, because they remain inside their own country.
5. Their own government holds primary responsibility for protecting them.
   1. That is the weak point when the government is itself a party to the conflict that displaced them.
   2. Reaching IDPs also needs the state's consent for access, which a refugee crossing a border does not need.
6. The Kampala Convention, adopted by the African Union in 2009 and in force since 6 December 2012, is the only binding regional treaty on internal displacement.
   1. It covers displacement by conflict, by disasters and by development projects such as dams and infrastructure schemes.
   2. That last category shows a lawful administrative process can still produce forced movement.

Push Factors: Conflict Displacement Hit a Record in 2025 as Disaster Displacement Fell Back

1. IDMC recorded 32.3 million internal displacements by conflict and violence in 2025, the highest annual figure in its series (GRID 2026).
2. Disasters accounted for 29.9 million internal displacements in the same year, so conflict passed disasters for the first time on record (GRID 2026).
   1. Disaster displacement fell by about 35 percent from the 45.8 million recorded in 2024, which was the highest disaster figure since IDMC began monitoring in 2008 (GRID 2025).
   2. The 2025 disaster total still sits above the previous decade's annual average, so the crossover comes from a fall on one side as much as a rise on the other.
3. Armed Conflict And Persecution
   1. Front lines, shelling and sieges can make a home uninhabitable within hours.
   2. Targeted persecution of an ethnic, religious or political group displaces selectively rather than by area.
4. Sudden-Onset Environmental Events
   1. Floods, cyclones, earthquakes and wildfires displace large numbers quickly, usually over short distances.
   2. Most of those people move within their own country, so these events produce IDPs rather than refugees.
5. Slow-Onset Environmental Change
   1. Drought, salinisation, coastal erosion and sea-level rise remove livelihoods gradually, so departure can look voluntary even where the option to stay has gone.
   2. Attribution is harder here because no single dated event forces the move.
6. Development And Land Acquisition
   1. Dams, mines, ports and urban redevelopment displace people by legal order rather than by violence.
   2. Compensation is usually calculated on land and buildings rather than on lost customers, kin networks and grazing rights.

Bangladesh and Syria: Environmental and Political Forced Movement

Bangladesh: Cyclones and Riverbank Erosion in a Delta

1. Environmental Trigger
   1. Bangladesh occupies the low-lying Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta, where cyclones, storm surges, floods and riverbank erosion repeatedly damage homes, farmland and freshwater supplies.
   2. Cyclone Remal caused about 1.1 million internal displacements in Bangladesh in May 2024, the largest share of the cyclone's displacement across Bangladesh and India (IDMC, 2024 mid-year update).
   3. IOM's first nationwide assessment estimated that 4,955,527 people were still internally displaced by natural hazards in December 2025.
2. Movement Pattern
   1. The movement is primarily internal and involuntary, first toward nearby embankments or settlements and then, where livelihoods cannot recover, toward urban centres such as Dhaka (IOM Bangladesh Crisis Response Plan 2025).
   2. The World Bank projects that climate impacts on agriculture, water scarcity and sea-level rise could produce 13.3 million internal climate migrants in Bangladesh by 2050.
3. Consequences For People And Places
   1. At the origin, erosion removes the land on which housing and farming depend, while cyclones can destroy homes, crops and stored assets in a single event.
   2. At the destination, low-income arrivals often enter informal housing, which increases demand for secure tenure, water, sanitation, transport and work in Dhaka.
   3. The destination can therefore reduce immediate exposure to a cyclone or an eroding riverbank while creating new risks through overcrowding, insecure housing and weak services.

Syria: Civil War, Internal Displacement and Refugee Movement

1. Political Trigger
   1. Conflict beginning in 2011 forced civilians to move because of violence, persecution, damaged infrastructure and the collapse of local livelihoods.
2. Scale And Direction
   1. At mid-2025, 6.5 million people remained internally displaced in Syria and 5.6 million Syrian refugees and asylum seekers remained outside the country (UNHCR Mid-Year Trends 2025).
   2. By December 2025, UNHCR recorded 4.3 million Syrian refugees registered in neighbouring Türkiye, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt.

1. Consequences For People And Places
   1. Displaced households have faced lost documents, interrupted schooling, insecure work and separation from homes, property and family networks.
   2. Countries and communities near Syria have carried long-term pressure on housing, schools, health care and labour markets, especially as international support has declined.
   3. Return does not cancel displacement, because almost 1.5 million returns to or within Syria in the first half of 2025 occurred while insecurity persisted and basic services were absent or inadequate in many areas (UNHCR Mid-Year Trends 2025).

Consequences for People: Lost Status and Lost Livelihoods Outlast the Journey

1. Legal Status And Documents
   1. Lost identity papers block access to schools, banking, formal work and land claims.
   2. A pending asylum claim often carries no right to work, which pushes people into informal jobs.
2. Livelihoods And Schooling
   1. Displacement separates farmers from land and traders from customers, so local skills lose their value.
   2. Interrupted schooling compounds across years of displacement.
3. Health And Living Conditions
   1. Crowded sites raise transmission of measles, cholera and respiratory infection.
   2. Water and sanitation systems in host settlements are sized for the resident population rather than for arrivals.

1. Protracted Displacement
   1. Displacement commonly lasts years rather than weeks, so sites develop markets, schools and rents.
   2. Colombia still counted 7.2 million IDPs at the end of 2025, which shows displacement accumulating across decades (GRID 2026).
2. Agency And Self-Organisation
   1. Displaced people arrange transport, remittances, schooling and site committees themselves.
   2. Aid agencies work through those arrangements rather than replacing them.

Consequences for Places: Origin Areas Lose Labour While Destinations Absorb Demand

1. At The Area Of Origin
   1. Departure strips working-age labour, so farmland goes uncultivated.
   2. Clinics and schools close when their staff leave, which lowers the chance of return.
   3. Empty housing degrades or is occupied by others, which creates property disputes on return.
   4. Tax revenue and market demand fall together, which slows recovery even after fighting stops.
2. At The Destination
   1. Arrivals concentrate in border districts and in cities rather than spreading evenly across the host country.
   2. Around 65 percent of refugees and others needing international protection lived in a country neighbouring their origin at the end of 2025 (UNHCR Global Trends, June 2026).
   3. Travel cost, visa rules and border geography shape that concentration, so it is not evidence of preference on its own.
   4. Rents rise fastest in the cheapest housing, so competition falls hardest on low-income residents.
   5. Water, waste and schooling systems reach their limits first, because their capacity is fixed in the short term.
   6. Labour supply rises, which can lift output while depressing wages in the specific trades that displaced workers enter.
3. Where Sites Are Placed
   1. Camps are commonly built on marginal land such as floodplains, steep slopes or dry margins, which raises exposure to the next hazard.
   2. Dense tarpaulin shelters with open cooking fires carry a high fire risk.
   3. A single fire can destroy hundreds of shelters within an hour, so the same households are displaced twice.