Beyond Containment – Confronting Racial Hierarchies in International Law: Designing denial of reparations – Race, the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and Climate IDPs

The 1990s marked a critical decade in the global recognition of climate change and its impacts. The 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil stands out as a decisive turning point, with states from across the world adopting the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In doing so, they acknowledged that high-income countries bear greater responsibility for climate change due to the unprecedented volumes of greenhouse gas emissions generated by their industrialized lifestyles – emissions that have accumulated in the atmosphere beyond safe levels. At the same time, broad scientific consensus had already recognized that migration, including internal displacement, would become one of the most significant consequences of climate change, as “millions are displaced by shoreline erosion, coastal flooding, and severe drought.”

Also in 1992, the UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali appointed Francis Deng as his Representative to examine the root causes of internal displacement as a global crisis and to develop a legal framework to address it. Deng’s appointment was influenced both by his African background and by the high number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) on the continent at the time. His home country, Sudan, had the largest population of IDPs globally caused by both conflict and droughts, and his own community, the Dinka, was among those most severely affected.

Deng collaborated with Roberta Cohen, who had held senior roles in NGOs and the U.S. government and was instrumental in urging the UN to recognize internal displacement as an urgent issue requiring global attention. Between 1992 and 1998, Deng and Cohen led the development of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement – an international framework consisting of 30 principles – and co-authored a book documenting the key ideas and decisions behind its structure.

How did Deng and Cohen, despite state commitments, lived experience, and scientific consensus on the link between climate change and displacement, shape an international framework that denies those internally displaced within our borders by climate events (climate IDPs) the right to seek reparations from the states most responsible? Even more troubling, as I examine in my chapter in Emancipating International Law, why did they deploy racist discourses to normalize this denial ?

Denying climate IDPs reparations

Deng and Cohen are decorated diplomats, policy makers, and scholars. Yet, they ultimately succumbed to a familiar racist discourse in their conceptualization of the Guiding Principles. They posited that the problem of internal displacement, including when it is climate change induced, is cultural and civilizational and can only be resolved through the spread of democracy and human rights in Third World states, the sites of the internal displacement crisis.

To advance this colonial narrative, Deng and Cohen abandoned their earlier understanding of internal displacement as a post-Cold War phenomenon. Initially, they noted:

“[I]n the four decades of their struggle, the United States and the Soviet Union contributed to the development and intensification of internal conflicts in Africa, in Asia and in Latin America. The two superpowers enlisted client governments and political or opposition movements in their ‘cause’, supplying them with arms, often directly, sometimes through proxies, and usually in large quantities . . . Many of the major instances of internal displacement during the 1970s and 1980s took place in regions and states that were the locus of cold war proxy wars.”

With the end of the Cold War, they were prompted to locate another culprit:

“If a preponderant number of situations of internal displacement are related to external political developments such as the cold war or its end, then internal displacement could decline as the world gradually adjusts to a new post-cold war equilibrium. On the other hand, if deep-rooted issues of collective identity are at the base of many conflicts, then the number of internally displaced persons might rise as the demand grows for local and regional autonomy and independence.”

Then, during a time when the role of climate change in displacing millions was already established, Deng and Cohen reached the following startling conclusion:

“Thus, the hope remains that the spread of democracy and respect for human rights may yet show the way toward the easing of crises of national identity and internal displacement.”

For Deng and Cohen, internal displacement is a crisis of Third World states which requires their maturation into democracies and human rights-respecting polities. Before unpacking the racist undertones, it is crucial to reiterate that they applied this conclusion to both conflict and climate-induced displacement:

“Persons uprooted by natural disasters…were included in the definition [of who are IDPs in the Guiding Principles] because in some natural disasters governments respond by discriminating or neglecting certain groups on political or ethnic grounds, or by violating their rights in other ways. When drought ravaged Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, its government forcibly relocated thousands of Tigrayans it regarded as political opponents, under the pretext of responding to a natural disaster. During the same period, Sudan suffered drought-related famine in the western and eastern parts of the country that the government was reticent to recognize until forced by international pressure.   In other countries as well, people have been displaced because of a combination of natural disasters and racial, social, and political factors.”

They further argued that those displaced by human-made disasters (where climate change falls) were included within the definition of internally displaced persons (IDPs) for the same reasons outlined above. 

Returning to Deng and Cohen’s colonial narrative, some may recognize a familiar form of racial prejudice. Their conclusion hints that the First World generally does not face crises of internal displacement because they are mature democracies with a strong human rights record, in stark contrast to Third World states. Moreover, as is common with civilizational discourses, the implication is that Third World states cannot do for themselves and must accept Western tutelage towards ‘the spread of democracy and respect for human rights’ rather than the accountability of First World nation-states for climate change-inducing industrial practices and lifestyles.

Charity in the place of climate and racial justice

Masses in Flight: The Global Crisis of Internal Displacement, co-authored by Deng and Cohen, captures the key historical processes behind the Guiding Principles, as well as their preferred response to the crisis. They note that humanitarian and development organizations should coordinate the delivery of aid to IDPs while regional organizations, such as the then Organisation of African Unity, should monitor and safeguard humanitarian relief operations, ensuring that charitable goods are not commandeered for strategic objectives. Masses in Flight advocates for restating existing international human rights, humanitarian, and refugee law, excluding First World climate responsibility from the equation.

Deng and Cohen believed the purpose of developing a normative instrument on internal displacement was twofold: first, to strengthen existing protections by consolidating relevant norms into a single coherent document and, second, to address gaps and ambiguities in these protections. They retained a team of experts to help them with this agenda. Walter Kalin and Robert Kogod Goldman played pivotal roles in outlining the factors to be considered as well as identifying the gaps. Like Deng and Cohen, they too did not attribute climate responsibility to First World states and proposed two factors to guide the content and structure of the Guiding Principles: whether humanitarian assistance exists under international law as a right for IDPs and whether the international community has a duty to intervene in Third World states experiencing internal displacement that are either unwilling or unable to resolve the underlying crisis.

Curiously, neither Kalin nor Goldman, Deng nor Cohen considered the UNFCCC regime, its Conference of Parties (COP), or the climate responsibility of first world states. They also did not engage with the idiosyncrasies of charity or humanitarian aid, as both an unpredictable and inadequate response to internal displacement, nor with the many questions surrounding humanitarian intervention as new wine in the old, discredited bottles of manifest destiny and white man’s burden. Last, they also dismissed the agency of climate IDPs, who possess valuable situated knowledge for managing their situation.

A life writing investigation needed in future research

Life writing can be broadly defined as any form of non-fiction that narrates the events and experiences of an individual life or a set of lives. Without a rigorous life writing investigation into Deng and Cohen, their motivations remain open to speculation. Why did they appear to sideline the growing momentum around holding First World states accountable for climate change and for displacement as one of its most significant consequences? Why were the Guiding Principles never negotiated but articulated and adopted?

Future research may explore these questions to explain why such decorated diplomats, policy makers, and scholars deployed racialising discourses that ultimately foreclosed the possibility of reparations for climate IDPs within the Guiding Principles. Tellingly, Deng’s personal tribute to Cohen reveals much about the hierarchies within their professional relationship: 

“Our personalities were different but complementary. Anyone with a fraction of wisdom would not want to be on the opposite side from Roberta [Cohen], and I was fortunate enough to be naturally on her side and she on mine. Her challenge to my acknowledged tendency to favour a diplomatic, constructive engagement with governments contrasted with her inclination to be a more aggressive defender of human rights. This was always a source of creative tension between us but we both realised the value of our complementarity and, over the years, inched toward one another.”

Understanding whether their ‘different but complementary’ personalities influenced the final product of the Guiding Principles is something that a thorough life writing investigation might uncover. Also revelatory are Cohen’s declared views of Deng:

“Deng’s position, like that of other representatives and rapporteurs emanating from the Commission on Human Rights, was a voluntary one with only limited human and material resources made available by the UN. Although governments had requested him to undertake a major legal analysis for the world community, it was basically left up to him to find the people and the funds to do it. When Deng travelled to New Haven to meet with legal scholars assembled from Yale and Harvard, the UN did not even pay his train fare; nor did it fund the meetings that brought together experts to discuss the relevant legal issues. It was from their offices at the Brookings Institution that the representative and I directly contacted individual lawyers and institutions to seek their pro bono involvement and solicited foundations and donor governments for funds to carry through the process of developing a legal framework.”

Much can be gleaned from these two statements alone: each appears to be fond of the other, albeit with important reservations. Ultimately, however, Deng’s preferred approach was overshadowed by Cohen’s, and, perhaps more importantly, by the Brookings Institution that bankrolled their efforts.

One element left out of their spirited engagement with IDPs is the race of the victims. Despite the absence of any mention of a racial hierarchy and climate IDPs not crossing the borders of their own states, racial injustices are embedded within the Guiding Principles, preserving both white innocence and white epistemic authority within international law.

Consistency with white supremacist desires

Scholarship and public discourse on race and climate-related displacement have largely focused on cross-border movement. However, racism at the intersection of displacement and climate change is also evident even when those displaced by extreme weather events – such as droughts, floods and cyclones – remain stranded within their national borders. The UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement illustrate this dynamic by reinforcing two mutually reinforcing desires of white supremacy. First, they safeguard the resources of life for First World peoples, which cross-border displacement is believed to threaten. This might sound like a harsh interpretation, but Deng and Cohen acknowledge it themselves: 

“[The] international preoccupation with preventing refugee flows has also brought increased attention to the internally displaced . . . This spurred greater interest in protecting and assisting persons displaced within their own countries as a means of discouraging them from seeking asylum.”

Second, the Guiding Principles foreclose claims for reparations – whether in the form of financial support or access to environmentally sound technologies. As a result, climate IDPs, often informal agrarian and pastoralist groups or slum dwellers, are left to fend for themselves. 

In the absence of reparations, they are unable to easily rebuild their livelihoods. Moreover, because they have not been groomed for capitalist industrial production, they are excluded from formal employment and rendered redundant within the logic of global capitalism. As a result, they are treated as disposable – effectively consigned to a slow death and contained far from the centers of capital.