Emergency Governance and the Unequal Protection of Internally Displaced People: Political Alignment, State Responses, and Human Security in Conflict-Affected States

Internal displacement is not only a humanitarian condition; it is also a political relationship between displaced populations and the state. Governments decide whether to protect displaced citizens, restrict their movement, provide public services, or expose them to heightened insecurity. This paper develops a research framework for examining whether political alignment helps explain variation in state responses to internally displaced people (IDPs) when displacement overlaps with public-health emergencies. Building on research on displacement, civilian targeting, and government responses to forced displacement, I argue that emergency health governance can be understood as an additional domain in which states may enact selective protection or selective restriction. The paper does not assume that health measures are inherently coercive. Instead, their political meaning depends on how they are distributed, implemented, justified, and enforced across displaced populations. I develop testable propositions and a mixed-methods research design combining cross-national analysis with qualitative process tracing.