by Prof. Nergis Canefe, President, IASFM on behalf of the IASFM Executive Committee
Introduction and Mandate
The International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) is an independent, self-governing collective of scholars, practitioners, and activists. Since its establishment in 1994, IASFM has rejected traditional, detached academic paradigms, instead operating at the intersection of intersectional research and field-based engagement to improve the material conditions of displaced populations. The association’s core mandate is to expose and dismantle the systemic drivers of global population uprooting by fostering interdisciplinary, interventionist scholarship on the root causes, structural consequences, and lived realities of displacement. This mandate encompasses refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs), stateless individuals, and those dispossessed by racial capitalism, climate injustice, ecological destruction, and neo-colonial development projects.
IASFM approaches forced migration not through a state-centric humanitarian lens, but as a critique of the modern nation-state system and global capital accumulation. The association’s Biennial Conferences function as spaces for counter-hegemonic organizing. By intentionally holding these conferences in regions experiencing acute state violence and displacement—such as Uganda, Colombia, India, Cyprus, and South Africa—IASFM rejects the traditional institutional settings of the Global North. This spatial strategy shifts power to local communities, grassroots organizations, and displaced peoples, directly connecting resistance networks from the Global South and North to circumvent state-sanctioned gatekeeping. The IASFM Secretariat is currently based at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University in Canada.
A core principle of IASFM is the intentional rejection of restrictive legal categories, such as “refugee,” in favor of the broader and politically charged term “forced migration” (Hathaway, 2007). Mainstream legal regimes use fragmented definitions to exclude millions, including those fleeing climate collapse or economic deprivation, thereby rationing protection and legitimizing the deportation of individuals classified as “voluntary” or “illegal.” By defining forced migration as the absence of genuine choice, IASFM centers its research on the absolute, non-negotiable rights to protection, dignity, and freedom of movement across all borders.
Historically, the academic discipline of forced migration has positioned the Global North as a benevolent savior and primary problem-solver, while depicting the Global South as an inherently chaotic site of “refugee crises” (Canefe, 2023; Clark-Kazak, 2023; Krause, 2021). IASFM explicitly challenges this Eurocentric narrative. The Global North is identified as a primary architect of global displacement through military intervention, carbon dominance, and economic exploitation, yet it hosts only a small fraction of the world’s displaced population. Approximately 85% of all displaced persons are hosted in the Global South and East (UNHCR, 2025b). This reframing constitutes an act of epistemic restitution, compelling recognition that the primary material, social, and humanitarian burdens of forced migration are borne by the regions most affected by displacement. While mainstream Western media generates moral panic regarding border enforcement and mass arrivals, the reality is that displacement is predominantly intra-regional, with affected populations seeking refuge in neighboring communities. This annual review rejects the artificial separation of regional profiles, instead tracing the interconnected dynamics of complicity, extraction, and resistance linking the Global South, Global East, and Global North.
Global Annual Overview: The Scale of Global Dispossession
As of April 2026, more than 120 million people have been forcibly displaced due to the combined effects of racial capitalism and border imperialism (UNHCR, 2025c). This unprecedented level of global displacement is driven by escalating military industrialization, localized resource conflicts, catastrophic climate breakdown, and the increasing use of authoritarian surveillance systems. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reports that the global population of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has reached 82.2 million (IDMC, 2026). Of these, 68.6 million have been displaced by conflict and structural violence, while 13.6 million are displaced by environmental disasters (IDMC, 2026).
The global geography of displacement highlights deep historic scars: the ongoing imperial and regional destruction of Syria accounts for 13.5 million displaced persons, while decades of foreign intervention and systemic abandonment have left 10.3 million Afghans permanently uprooted (UNHCR, 2025b). In Europe, the militarized devastation of Ukraine has resulted in 8.8 million displaced persons, divided between 3.7 million internally trapped and 5.8 million scattered as precarious exiles across foreign states (IDMC, 2026; UNHCR, 2025b). Concurrently, internal resistance, state repression, and armed escalations in Iran and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) account for roughly two-thirds of all new conflict-driven internal movements globally, pushing the DRC’s internal displacement trajectory toward an unprecedented 9 million by the end of 2026 (IDMC, 2026).
In response to this global crisis, state actors increasingly manipulate humanitarian data to report an increase in “population returns,” highlighting the movement of over 6.9 million people back to devastated areas (UNHCR, 2025b). Most of these returns occur in the “Big Four” regions: the DRC (1.9 million), Syria (1.5 million), Sudan (1.2 million), and Afghanistan (874,900). Critical human rights monitors indicate that these statistics reflect coercion rather than genuine choice. Such returns are rarely “voluntary, safe, or dignified”; instead, they are systematically orchestrated by host states through manufactured destitution, withdrawal of humanitarian aid, forced evictions, physical pushbacks, and the removal of legal status, rendering life in exile untenable (UNHCR, 2025b).
Regional Breakdown: Cartographies of Containment and Resistance
- Africa and the Middle East
The ongoing destruction of Sudan represents the world’s most acute crisis of aggregate displacement and humanitarian abandonment. Following three years of unmitigated civil war powered by international arms flows and resource extraction, 14.3 million people have been violently displaced. This includes 11.6 million internally displaced within a collapsed infrastructure and 2.1 million forced across borders into precarious exile in Chad, South Sudan, and Egypt (UNHCR, 2025b). Across the African continent, over 40 million people are currently displaced by a toxic combination of protracted wars, ecological disasters and structural adjustment programs that have gutted the public infrastructure. Famine has been weaponized as a tool of warfare in North Darfur and South Kordofan, while in the eastern DRC, corporate-backed resource exploitation and conflict between government forces and the M23 militia are projected to drive internal displacement past 9 million by the end of 2026 (IDMC, 2026).
In the Middle East, displacement is used as a deliberate tool of demographic engineering and state violence. In Gaza, over two consecutive years of Israeli military bombardment have internally displaced 1.9 million people—90% of the entire population—into crowded, diseased, and intentionally starved strips of land. In Lebanon, military escalations have forcibly uprooted over 1 million people, superimposing a new domestic crisis onto an existing population of Syrian and Palestinian refugees, forcing them into volatile secondary and tertiary displacements. In Iran, intensifying state repression, localized conflicts, and regional proxy warfare led by Israel and the United States have left 3.2 million people internally displaced, even as the state continues to act as a highly volatile host for millions of precarious Afghan exiles (IDMC, 2026).
- Latin America and the Caribbean
Latin America has structurally transitioned from a transit zone to a permanent arena of internal and structural containment. The Venezuelan displacement crisis remains the largest in the Western Hemisphere, with nearly 8 million citizens globally displaced by economic blockade and internal political impasse (UNHCR, 2025b). Colombia continues to trap 2.85 million Venezuelans on its unofficial labour markets, followed by Peru (1.6 million) and Brazil (761,000). In these host states, rising state-sanctioned xenophobia, rampant inflation, and a systemic refusal to grant permanent legal status trigger mass secondary expulsions and desperate returns to an economy still under severe sanctions.
This crisis is further accelerated by the collapse of state institutions in Haiti and Ecuador. In Haiti, a corporate and political vacuum has allowed armed groups to seize control, driving an internal displacement crisis of over 1.4 million people and pushing rural provinces like Artibonite and Centre into acute food insecurity. In Ecuador, the state declaration of an internal armed conflict has militarized urban centers, causing over 316,000 internal displacements since 2022 through urban warfare and gang criminalization (IDMC, 2026). In the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic continues its campaign of racialized violence against Dominicans of Haitian descent. Relying on retroactive citizenship-stripping laws, the Dominican state deported nearly 380,000 people of Haitian origin in 2025 alone, forcing them into a collapsed state completely unable to guarantee basic safety or survival.
- Asia
Asia remains caught in protracted containment regimes and in the devastation of climate change. In Afghanistan, the crisis has shifted from flight to forced, punitive repatriation. Hardline nationalistic crackdowns and mass expulsion decrees implemented by Pakistan and Iran have forced roughly 5 million Afghans back across the border over the last two years, dumping them into an environment crippled by severe drought and international economic isolation. In Myanmar, the military junta’s shifting frontline campaigns have expanded conflict directly into urban-adjacent districts, driving internal displacement to 3.7 million people (IDMC, 2026). For the 1.3 million Rohingya trapped between the squalor of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh and the militarized apartheid of Rakhine State, the total denial of citizenship makes safe return impossible, driving thousands to risk death in maritime escapes across the Andaman Sea.
Forced migration in India and China is shaped by climate disasters and ethno-nationalistic state projects. India hosts over 200,000 refugees—including Chin and Rohingya populations—in a state of artificial, de facto statelessness, utilizing its non-signatory status to the 1951 Refugee Convention to deny basic human rights (Canefe, 2018). Simultaneously, internal ethno-political violence, such as the conflict in Manipur, has left over 70,000 people internally displaced (IDMC, 2026). In China, extreme monsoon failures and rapid ecological degradation in the Yangtze and Pearl River basins trigger some of the largest numbers of sudden internal displacements globally (IDMC, 2026). The state’s mass “eco-migration” relocation initiatives, which move rural populations into dense urban peripheries, are framed as environmental protection, but are heavily criticized by critical scholars as mechanisms for compulsory assimilation, cultural erasure and land consolidation.
- North America
In North America, forced migration is governed by a militarized border industrial complex designed to protect the wealth of the Global North from the crises it helps create. Following a period under the Biden administration characterized by high refugee settlement caps, increased asylum grants, and temporary humanitarian protections, enforcement trends shifted dramatically going into 2026. The Trump administration has implemented severe restrictions on asylum processing and sharply curtailed traditional refugee entry paths (Walia, 2021).
A primary driver of migration toward North America is the combined impact of political instability, economic collapse, and environmental shocks across Central America and the Caribbean, including persistent rainfall deficits that prompt migration from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador (IOM, 2026). Migrants traversing these routes encounter heavily militarized enforcement zones (IOM, 2026). Upon arrival in host countries such as the United States, structural barriers significantly affect their long-term well-being. For example, longstanding federal immigration regulations have produced enduring “chilling effects” that discourage undocumented and precarious migrants from accessing essential healthcare services, preventive testing, and social safety nets, thereby exacerbating public health outcomes during crises (WHO, 2026).
- Europe
Europe operates as a highly fortified area of border externalization, racial segregation and legal exclusion. In Eastern Europe, the state of displacement from Ukraine has consolidated into permanent social precarity, with 3.7 million people internally trapped and 5.8 million as refugees abroad (IDMC, 2026; UNHCR, 2025b). Ongoing attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure fuel continuous short-term displacement. While millions have attempted to return, long-term return rates are steadily declining as exiles are integrated as precarious, low-wage labour in Western and Central Europe. Poland, while hosting the highest volume of Ukrainian exiles, has sharply militarized its larger migration policies. Expanding temporary internal checks, it has deployed the heavily funded “SAFE” program—an infrastructure of surveillance drones, thermal imaging, and biometric sensor towers designed to block non-European asylum seekers.
Concurrently, the European Union states are facing a severe demographic divide. Western and Northern European states face impending population collapse and acute labour shortages, creating a structural dependency on the economic integration of refugees to sustain domestic social security networks (Bruegel, 2025). Conversely, Southern and Eastern European states focus heavily on external border security. Across the continent, the legal and social rights of displaced populations are deeply fragmented. Many European nations explicitly prohibit irregular or pending asylum seekers from accessing emergency social safety nets, keeping thousands in extended legal limbo and socio-economic marginalization (WHO, 2026).
Emergent Areas of Inquiry
- Climate Colonialism and Environmental Dispossession
The traditional legal division between the “political refugee” and the “economic/environmental migrant” is an ideological fiction designed to absolve the Global North of historical responsibility. Climate change is a primary threat multiplier, which cannot be separated from colonial patterns of resource extraction (IDMC, 2026). In places like the Mekong Delta in Vietnam or the Dry Corridor of Central America, seawater intrusion, land subsidence and extreme droughts destroy agrarian livelihoods, forcing rural populations into underprepared urban peripheries (IOM, 2026).
This dynamic is more accurately understood as climate colonialism: the Global North produces most of the carbon emissions, while the Global South bears the destructive consequences. This creates an existential crisis under the Anthropocene, locking targeted populations into a cyclical temporality of structural suffering and repeated displacement. Populations already living as refugees or IDPs (such as Sudanese in Chad or Rohingya in Bangladesh) are repeatedly uprooted from temporary camps by extreme weather events and flooding.
- Border Externalization, Digital Surveillance, and Surveillance Capitalism
States in the Global North are expanding their border controls both geographically and technologically, a trend known as border externalization (Adamson and Greenhill, 2025). This includes processing asylum claims in third countries, employing aggressive maritime interceptions and using bilateral aid agreements to compel transit states to block migration flows (IOM, 2026).
Simultaneously, there is a rapid proliferation of biometrics, AI-supported risk assessments, and digital tracking systems at international borders. Examples include Russia’s highly digitalized registry system and Poland’s sensor-driven “SAFE” program. While governments present these technologies as tools to simplify processing, scholars warn that they turn the humanitarian administration into an apparatus for digital surveillance. These systems create permanent, interoperable digital profiles that follow displaced persons across borders without clear legal safeguards, transparency or data privacy protections. This trend commodifies human suffering, reducing the lived reality of the displaced to algorithmic abstractions that enforce global apartheid through the cold violence of data (Molnar, 2024).
- Accelerated Urbanization and Protracted Precarity
Forced migration has shifted significantly from rural, camp-based environments to complex urban contexts. Although cities provide displaced persons with increased anonymity and potential access to informal economic opportunities, they also limit access to traditional humanitarian assistance. Rapid and unplanned urbanization, driven by forced influxes, places significant strain on municipal services and compels migrants to reside in hazardous informal housing and engage in precarious labor without legal protections (Hooper et al., 2026). As long-term returns to countries of origin become less feasible, states increasingly employ legal and economic precarity as mechanisms of social control. By systematically denying formal labor rights, states relegate refugees—especially racialized and undocumented women—to the lowest tiers of informal and exploitative labor markets. This condition of hyper-precarity normalizes lives characterized by undignified labor and gender-based profiling, ensuring that temporary protection regimes serve not as spaces of asylum, but as instruments of neoliberal economic extraction (Hooper et al., 2026).
- The Demographics of Displacement: Generational Loss and Statelessness
Global reported cases of statelessness remain high, at roughly 4.4 million individuals (UNHCR, 2025b). Children account for approximately 40% of the global refugee population, raising acute academic concern over the “lost generation” effect, where millions spend their entire formative years in displacement or are born into systemic statelessness (UNHCR, 2025b). Protracted generational statelessness crises—such as the Rohingya in Myanmar and Bangladesh, the Bidoon in Kuwait, and Dominicans of Haitian descent—illustrate how states utilize documentation deprivation as an intentional tool of exclusion. Critical legal scholarship highlights that contemporary citizenship and border regimes are firmly embedded in colonial practices of erasure and population tracking. In areas such as the Middle East and South Asia, postcolonial state formations have internalized and used imperial legal codes to strip marginalized minorities of nationality, rendering them permanently stateless. In response, emerging global frameworks, such as the Global Alliance to End Statelessness, are driving “Solution Seeker” programs to provide legal technical assistance to reform discriminatory domestic nationality laws, closing the legal gaps that perpetuate childhood statelessness.
Methodological Developments
The evolution of forced migration studies has led to critical reassessments of research design, implementation, and application. Methodological approaches are evolving to address historical imbalances, ethical risks, and operational challenges inherent in researching precarious populations. Recent field developments emphasize the need to dismantle colonial, top-down epistemic systems that treat displaced persons merely as passive objects of Western academic research (Krause, 2021). Scholars emphasize the “co-production of knowledge”, diligently involving refugees and IDPs as equal partners and co-researchers throughout the study cycle—from conceptualization to publication (Lenette, 2022). This paradigm shift requires researchers to favour local, indigenous and South-led knowledge systems over Eurocentric frameworks. Methodologists warn that failing to center these perspectives results in “extractive research” that profits academic careers in the Global North while failing to produce structural or material improvements for the communities being scrutinized (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2013).
1.Participatory, Arts-Based, and Visual Methods
To circumvent language barriers, reduce power differentials and mitigate the limitations of rigid quantitative questionnaires, researchers increasingly use participatory, qualitative and arts-based methodologies (Vacchelli, 2018). Approaches such as photo-voice, participatory mapping, digital storytelling and joint physical theatre allow displaced persons to communicate their experiences of displacement and fortitude on their own terms (Lenette, 2019). These procedures help to detect complex social relationships and affective landscapes that standard standardized interviews could miss. Further, arts-based research methods support collaborative spaces where local populations can combine traditional cultural knowledge with their experiences of displacement, cultivate community resilience and offer counter-narratives to mainstream media characterizations (O’Neill, 2010).
- Quantitative Inventions, Big Data, and Ethical Digital Tracking
Concurrently, the data environment has been transformed by quantitative and technological innovations. The integration of Big Data, including mobile network call detail records (CDRs), high-resolution satellite imagery, and geolocated social media scraping, enables real-time tracking, mapping, and forecasting of mass displacement movements during active conflicts or environmental emergencies (Salah et al., 2019).019). However, these digital methods also bring deep ethical and methodological risks. The uncritical deployment of predictive modelling and algorithmic border tracking can unintentionally expose highly at risk populations to state surveillance, targeted violence or systemic pushback (Molnar, 2024). Consequently, contemporary scholarship on forced migration needs a critical, protective framework regarding “digital humanitarianism”, making sure that technological efficiency does not override basic rights to data privacy, informed consent, and do-no-harm principles (Read et al., 2016).
- Ethics of Care and Navigating Extreme Asymmetries
Conducting research within spaces of displacement requires navigating profound power asymmetries, legal precarity and institutional gatekeeping (Jacobsen & Landau, 2003). Methodologists argue for a transition from standard, compliance-driven institutional review board (IRB) metrics to a radical “feminist ethics of care” (Clark-Kazak, 2023). This framework recognizes participants’ systemic vulnerabilities and mandates an ongoing, relational practice of informed consent that adapts to changing geopolitical contexts. Ethical fieldwork designs must create structural reciprocity, ensuring that research outputs provide tangible legal resources, capacity-building, and advocacy support directly to uprooted communities (Hugman et al., 2011).
- Forced Migration, Reciprocity and Radical Futures
A critical synthesis of current global displacement trends demonstrates that forced migration should no longer be viewed as a series of isolated, short-term humanitarian emergencies. Instead, it constitutes a structural element of global governance, shaped by profound geopolitical asymmetries. The continued increase in the global displaced population, now exceeding 120 million, underscores the inadequacy of traditional legal instruments, such as the 1951 Refugee Convention, in addressing complex drivers like climate change and international conflict. Additionally, as affluent states in the Global North externalize their borders and implement advanced digital surveillance systems, they shift the responsibilities of protection onto under-resourced nations in the Global South and East, which host the majority of displaced people. Methodologically, these developments necessitate the rejection of extractive, Eurocentric academic practices in favor of decolonial, co-produced, and action-oriented research frameworks that respect the agency, lived experiences, and knowledge of displaced communities. Addressing the crises of forced migration requires dismantling colonial narratives about mobility and moving from paternalistic, aid-dependent models to a rights-based approach that emphasizes systemic reciprocity.
References
Adamson, F. B., & Greenhill, K. M. (2025). Organized forced migration and the external drivers of eliminationist politics. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 52(2), 112–134. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2595809
Bruegel. (2025). The demographic divide: Inequalities in ageing across the European Union (Policy Brief No. 2025/03). Bruegel Open Archive. https://www.bruegel.org/policy-brief/demographic-divide-inequalities-ageing-across-european-union
Canefe, N. (2018). Invisible lives: Gender, dispossession, and precarity amongst Syrian refugee women in the Middle East. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 34(1), 39–49. https://doi.org/10.7202/1050853ar
Canefe, N. (2023). Decolonizing forced migration studies: Notes from borderlands. In Decolonial Politics in European Peripheries (pp. 132–148). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003246848-9
Clark-Kazak, C. (2023). “Why care now” in forced migration research? Imagining a radical feminist ethics of care. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 22(4), 1151–1173. https://doi.org/10.7202/1106679ar
Hathaway, J. C. (2007). Forced migration studies: Could we agree just to ‘date’? Journal of Refugee Studies, 20(3), 349–369. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fem019
Hooper, K., Mora, M. J., Goldfarb, A., & Banulescu-Bogdan, N. (2026). Creating inclusive urban economies for migrants and refugees. Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/migration-information-source
Hugman, R., Pittaway, E., & Bartolomei, L. (2011). When ‘do no harm’ is not enough: The ethics of research with refugees and other vulnerable groups. British Journal of Social Work, 41(7), 1271–1287. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcr013
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). (2026). 2026 Global report on internal displacement (GRID). Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre & Norwegian Refugee Council. https://www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2026
International Organization for Migration (IOM). (2026). How immigration crackdowns and aid cuts are reshaping migration across Central America. IOM Global Data Institute.
Jacobsen, K., & Landau, L. B. (2003). The dual imperative in refugee research: Some methodological and ethical considerations in social science research on forced migration. Disasters, 27(3), 185–206. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7717.00228
Krause, U. (2021). Colonial roots of the global refugee regime: Shifting views from West to East. Third World Quarterly, 42(8), 1649–1667. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2021.1923299
Lenette, C. (2019). Arts-based methods in refugee research: Creating sanctuary. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8004-4
Lenette, C. (2022). Participatory action research with refugees in temporary contexts: Decolonizing knowledge production. Routledge.
Molnar, P. (2024). The walls have eyes: Border surveillance and the sovereignty of code. New Press.
O’Neill, M. (2010). Asylum, migration and community. Policy Press.
Read, R., Taithe, B., & Mac Ginty, R. (2016). Data humanitarianism: The ethics of large-scale data collection and analysis in humanitarian emergencies. Journal of Humanitarian Action, 1(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-016-0005-9
Salah, A. A., Pentland, A., Lepri, B., & Letouzé, E. (Eds.). (2019). Guide to mobile data analytics in refugee scenarios. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12554-7
Sukarieh, M., & Tannock, S. (2013). On the ethics of research on refugees: The economic perspective. Journal of Refugee Studies, 26(4), 494–512. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fet022
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). (2025b). Global trends: Forced displacement in 2025. UNHCR Statistics Market Report.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). (2025c). Number of people uprooted by war at shocking, decade-high levels – UNHCR. UNHCR Briefing Materials. https://www.unhcr.org/news/press-releases/global-trends-2024
Vacchelli, E. (2018). Digital storytelling in migration research: A qualitative approach. Palgrave Macmillan.
Walia, H. (2021). Border and rule: Global migration, capitalism, and the rise of racist nationalism. Haymarket Books.
World Health Organization (WHO). (2026). Barriers and facilitators to healthcare access for refugee, immigrant, and migrant populations: An overview of reviews. PubMed Central (PMC), Article PMC12990447.
