This chapter analyzes one of the most visible consequences of ecocide: eco-migration. The international criminal justice system does not include detrimental effects of ecocide or of social harm resulting in forced migration flows as a genuine crime capable of being prosecuted. However, a recent landmark United Nations Human Rights Committee decision claims that people should not be returned to their place of origin if climate change appears to constitute a threat. The United Nations Refugee Agency also welcomes such a pioneering ruling since it lays the ground for potentially effective international protection. This work examines the contemporary loophole regarding eco-displacements and ecocide and clamors for both legal and criminological international conceptualisation at ensuring the rights of eco-migrants, considering the future number of eco-migrants is unforeseeable.

Beginning in April 1994, following one of the most rapid refugee influxes ever recorded, the transnational humanitarian industry descended upon Ngara, a quiet district located on the Tanzanian edge of the Tanzania-Rwanda border. Overnight, Ngara became the center for a humanitarian complex that sought to aid and confine more than half a million Rwandan refugees, including both victims and perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide.Based on archival research and over 100 interviews in Ngara, this essay explores Ngaran lived realities during the time that they became neighbors, victims, and entrepreneurs within a violent refugee context. The author argues that the refugee complex in Ngara, which included both refugees and expatriate aid workers, created a space of contradictory violence: a violence that was simultaneously disruptive and productive. Ngarans experienced the material and psychological harms of dislocation and physical violence associated with the refugee camps. Many also took advantage of novel economic opportunities created by the transnational refugee complex and the refugee population. This chapter demonstrates the paradoxical nature of refugee crises, and the lasting impact of this encounter on the lives and livelihoods of the Ngaran population.