Resilience policy and internally displaced women in Iraq: an unintentionally flawed approach

Internal displacement is a major humanitarian and security issue. Today there are far more internally displaced persons1 (IDPs) than refugees in the world. By the end of 2016, 40.3 million people were internally displaced by conflict and violence across the world, and an unknown number of IDPs remain displaced.2 This unprecedented scale of internal displacement in recent decades has led to the creation of international frameworks for the protection of IDPs and for the regulation of responses to internal displacement crises.3 More recently, resilience, an increasingly popular policy framing for humanitarian interventions, has become an important component of humanitarian interventions and it has made its way into responses to internal displacement in countries like Iraq. Iraq has the world’s sixth highest rate of forced displacements in the world today and third highest number of IDPs.4 Internal displacement in Iraq is primarily conflict-related and has a long and layered history as a result of Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, sectarianised militarisation, violence and counter-insurgency operations since the intervention in 2003,5 and the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (also known as Daesh). As of June 2017, more than three million Iraqis live in a state of displacement.6 This policy brief offers an assessment of the concept of resilience as an international policy frame. While appreciating the potential of resilience as influential and potentially radical in many areas, I argue that it offers a simplistic understanding of the causes of gendered vulnerabilities in conflict-related displacement, at least, in the context of Iraq