Global refugee numbers are at their highest since the early 1990s: 21.3 million people.* As if this were not bad enough, the typical focus on refugees leads to a radical underestimation of the disruption to people’s lives caused by violent disorder. To be classified as a refugee you have to cross an international border. Many people fleeing

Reflecting its intention, the legal definition of a refugee was someone who is outside her or his country of nationality and faces a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’. It was unambiguously a product of its time and place, explicitly

Seventy years ago, the international community faced the largest

We live in disturbed times. There are more people displaced than at any time since the Second World War. Most of these 65 million uprooted people remain within their own countries, but nearly a third – over 20 million – had no alternative but to cross a border. When they did, they became refugees.

What changed was that, for the first time, refugees moved spontaneously in large numbers from the poorer regions of the world to the richest.

Most host states place serious restrictions on the right to work;

But since the end of the Cold War, the average duration of exile has been over a decade

For the first time in its history, Europe received a mass influx of refugees from outside of the European region.

Today over half of the world’s refugees are in ‘protracted refugee situations’ and for them the average length of stay is over two decades. People are born into camps, grow up in camps, and become adults in camps.