This chapter tests the book’s arguments in a case study from Uganda. The Ugandan government faced a series of armed rebellions throughout the country from 1986 to 2006, and it forcibly relocated civilians while fighting some rebel groups but not others. This chapter draws on a wealth of information collected during six months of fieldwork in 2016 and 2017 on how, when, where, and why authorities employed displacement. By exploiting within-case variation in the location and timing of relocation by the same government, the chapter conducts a structured, controlled comparative analysis. Drawing on original data – including archival materials, subnational violence and displacement data, and hundreds of interviews and surveys with political officials, military officers, rank-and-file soldiers, civil society groups, journalists, community leaders, and civilians – it traces the decision by Ugandan counterinsurgents to employ forced relocation, examine the observable implications of the theory, and demonstrate the assortative logic of displacement. It also shows that alternative logics are insufficient to explain variation in this case.

In Chapter 7, I analyse cases in which decision-makers have to determine whether a person can seek refuge in an internally displaced persons’ (IDP) camp. This occurs in what is known as an ‘internal protection alternative’ inquiry. In some cases, asylum seekers have pleaded that if they returned to their homeland and relocated, they would have no option but to live in an IDP camp. Initially, in such cases decision-makers set a broad scope for adequate refuge and approached decisions with an ethic of international cooperation. But subsequently, there has been a transition in which decision-makers produce rudimentary notions of refuge. They give it a narrow scope – limiting it to bare survival rights – and there is a shift from understanding that refuge involves a nation-state bestowing protection to positioning refuge as something an individual can forge themselves. The understanding that refuge is an act of international solidarity has dissipated from the jurisprudence. Protection from life in an IDP camp will only be granted if the asylum seeker can establish that they are exceptionally vulnerable. A feminist analysis highlights that decision-makers’ notional approaches to the interactions between gender and vulnerability have resulted in problematic outcomes for both male and female refugees.