Such behaviour can be seen as an understandable part of the communal place-making process displaced people engage in to defend their new homes which they have invested in. This type of surveillance strategy for COVID-19, however, may create additional vulnerabilities which should be monitored, such as the potential for incarceration of migrants in unsafe conditions or mob violence directed towards those seen as putting the safety of camps at risk. RISKS OF INDUCING FURTHER INVOLUNTARY DISPLACEMENTS As described above, in many ways, forcibly-displaced people’s use of mobility as a coping measure has become more difficult amidst public health responses to COVID-19. These measures have also created conditions which may nevertheless prompt new forced and unsafe migrations. Emptying camps: In South Sudan, newly displaced populations sheltering in churches in Wau and Yei areas have been asked by church authorities to move and live with relatives or seek refuge in nearby POC camps, partly because they don’t want to encourage social gatherings that could spread COVID-19. Meanwhile, mechanisms for reducing the population in POCs across the country have been a preoccupation of the UN and government departments since they were created in 2013. As the COVID-19 crisis loomed in March 2020, UNMISS staff “very strongly encouraged people in the POCS to return home” to rural areas where people are assumed to have ancestral ties. The reduced connectivity and wider spacing between homes in villages were also presumed to make people safer from transmission.70 But for most residents, the assertion that they should go home is nonsensical, impractical and could push them towards dangerously violent realities. No POC residents’ ‘home’ has remained unchanged. Many residents have grown up in urban centres or moved there from sites of exile during the 1980s and 1990s. Emptying camps during a pandemic which has caused economic hardship for so many others across the country will add to the numbers of hungry people on the move and add to the demands on poor rural people’s food supplies. It would also likely contribute to conflicts over land which have driven the war so far. Reduction in peace-keeping efforts: As in many areas of the Middle East and East Africa, there is also a risk of new conflict-driven migrations if international peace-keeping efforts cannot be maintained through global travel restrictions for COVID-19. A likely consequence of retreating peacebuilding activities is that non-state armed groups will seize the opportunity to expand their frontiers, thus undermining ongoing peace processes. It also opens up the possibility of increased mortality in the context of violent conflicts. For displaced people wanting to return home, COVID-19-related delays to peace-keeping is yet another disappointing set-back, as poignantly captured by social media messages by images circulating on social media showing Syrians carrying signs reading “Stay at home, I wish I could!’. 71 OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES IN THE LOCALISATION OF COVID19 RESPONSES KEY CONSIDERATIONS: COVID-19 AND FORCED DISPLACEMENT IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND EAST AFRICA Contact: a.wilkinson@ids.ac.uk 14