Forced Displacement and the Crisis of Citizenship in Africa’s Great Lakes Region: Rethinking Refugee Protection and Durable Solutions Lucy Hovil and Zachary A. Lomo Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, Volume 31, Issue 2 (2015) https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.40308 This summary is part of a series of summaries of articles on statelessness. The quantitative literature on stateless population is very limited. We include these summaries in our Literature Review Updates and Database to highlight research on statelessness and the need to collect more data to facilitate analytical studies on the related issues. This article discusses the relationship between citizenship, belonging and displacement in Africa’s Great Lakes region, and how citizenship and exclusion affect the creation, experience, and resolution of displacement. Apart from Tanzania, all countries in the region have generated large numbers of refugees and IDPs since independence, and all have hosted refugees. The authors define citizenship as “a status, legal or otherwise, that designates full membership in a state or community with concomitant rights or entitlements and duties, including the right and duty to challenge inequality in that state or community.” They define “empirical citizenship” as “a status of being accepted into a given community as a member, even if not originally from there, and being able to exercise citizenship rights such as social and economic rights and fulfill civic duties, including paying local taxes.” The analysis is based on a desk review and interviews with refugees, IDPs, returnees, civil society, and officials in each of the seven countries where fieldwork was undertaken. Main arguments: • The inability to realize the benefit of citizenship is a root cause of both conflict and displacement in the region and the ongoing failure to find solutions to displacement. Many causes of conflict and forced displacement, such as human rights violations, struggle over control of political and economic power, ethnic conflict and civil war, are symptoms of deeper, interconnected problems. Post-independence leaders failed to reform the colonial state and reorganize political power to address discrimination, inequality, and politicized identities that were legally embedded within the colonial state. This has led to the exclusion, at least politically, of those considered outsiders, rather than to make efforts to encourage their integration. Instead of being perceived as a potential asset, refugees have been viewed as a threat or burden, 2