Since the onset of the armed insurgency in 2017, Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province has become a key site for examining the relationship between violent conflict, displacement, and urban transformation in Africa. While the insurgency has largely affected rural areas, it has generated large-scale internal displacement that has reshaped nearby urban centers, particularly the provincial capital, Pemba, whose inhabitants have almost doubled in just a few years. As internally displaced persons (IDPs) have moved toward the city seeking safety and access to humanitarian assistance, Pemba has increasingly functioned both as a refuge and as a hub for international humanitarian intervention.
While previous studies have focused on security, political, and developmental aspects of the conflict, the urban and ethnographic dimensions—particularly those related to displacement, social fragmentation, and everyday life—remain underexplored. The project thus addresses a significant gap in existing scholarship on Cabo Delgado by examining the intersection of conflict and urbanization. It investigates these processes through two interconnected analytical lenses: conflict urbanization and camp urbanism, while also considering the ethnic dimensions of displacement and settlement to understand how conflict dynamics unfold within the city. By linking the logics of conflict urbanization and camp urbanism, the study highlights how urban environments mediate the interactions between refuge, humanitarian intervention, and socio-political fragmentation.
This research adopts an ethnographical, bottom-up approach that centers the lived experiences of affected populations. Using Pemba as a single, in-depth case study, it combines semi-structured interviews, focus groups, participatory observation, and field visits to examine how internally displaced persons (IDPs), host communities, humanitarian actors, and local authorities experience and navigate these transformations.