Comparative Migration Studies volume 7 , Article number: 38 Cite this article. Metrics details. In recent years, forcibly displaced populations have attracted enormous media attention as an increasing number of disasters and political conflicts push more and more people to move away from their homes and seek refuge and opportunities in other places.
It is precisely because of these global trends that the plight of forcibly displaced populations is becoming more precarious and vulnerable, yet standard social protection provision rarely attends to the plight of these people. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the remit and implications for including a consideration of forcibly displaced populations including internally displaced people, refugees and asylum seekers within social protection policy and programming.
The majority of the literature and work on social protection has focused on the protection and provision of social assistance, social insurance and social services to vulnerable and poor populations in the global south. These populations are typically citizens or habitual residents of specific nation states, resulting in the majority of policy and programming efforts being developed by national Governments, or by national Governments in collaboration with support from international development support.
A notable and increasing yet relatively small exception to this has been research that documents and interrogates the relationship between labour migration and social protection. This literature has been critical to shifting the framing of social protection away from the constraints imposed by the nation state β instead allowing a discourse to emerge regarding how people are able to claim social rights beyond borders.
Footnote 1. Attention to forcibly displaced populations within the social protection field has been limited. That which is available is typically informed by research from the global North see Ambrosini, , and Sainsbury, This limit in focus is understandable due to the difficulties of establishing where the responsibility for provision of social rights lie -- especially in the case of refugees who are outside their country of residency.
