london global refugees city 21st eastern europe

In both cases, the international community is struggling to come up with viable collective responses.įirst, a growing number of states are characterised by chronic fragility, with weak governance leading to an inability or unwillingness to ensure the most fundamental human rights of citizens. Two global trends in particular suggest this: fragility and mobility.

However, there are also grounds to believe that refugees and displacement are likely to become a defining issue of the 21st century. If we were able to address the root causes of those conflicts, the number of refugees in the world would decline significantly. The UN high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, has described a “world at war”. There are humanitarian emergencies in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Somalia, Nigeria and, closer to home, in Ukraine. Most of these are in two regions, the Middle East and Africa. Today, there are a series of internal and regional armed conflicts around the world.

In general terms, the number of refugees in the world is broadly a function of the number of wars and human-rights-abusing dictatorships at any given time. This year, numbers are likely to exceed those figures but not dramatically, especially when one considers that in 1992 there were 15 EU member states and today there are 28. In 2001, numbers again peaked at 424,000 following the Kosovo crisis and with many arriving from Somalia and Afghanistan. In 1992, the EU received 672,000 asylum seekers, and numbers remained high during the Bosnia conflict. Asylum numbers do fluctuate over time depending on the state of the world, and Europe has witnessed significant spikes in numbers before.

London global refugees city 21st eastern europe