The decision to leave is never easy. One builds a home with more than money and time, and this space holds more than objects. But you decide to survive, so you leave. Forced displacement, whether it takes you elsewhere within your country as an internally displaced person or across borders as a refugee, begins with the trauma of departure. It is true whether you leave because your village is about to be flooded; because you are evicted from ancestral land acquired for an industrial project; or because the sound of gunfire is coming closer. And it appears as if every time you leave, it becomes more likely you will lose your home.
Forced migration (also called deracination — originally a French word meaning uprooting) refers to the coerced movement of a person or persons away from their home or home region. ‘Forced migration’ is not a legal concept, and similar to the concept of ‘migration’, there is no universally accepted definition.
Forced migration includes a number of legal or political categories. All involve people who have been forced to flee their homes and seek refuge elsewhere. Popular speech tends to call them all "refugees," but this is actually quite a narrow legal category. The majority of forced migrants flee for reasons not recognised by the international refugee regime, and many of them are displaced within their own country of origin.
