Measuring Misery: The Science & Politics of Forced Displacement Statistics

Public talk by Prof David Scott FitzGerald, University of California San Diego jointly hosted by IRIS and POLSIS, University of Birmingham, 2 February, 4-5.30 PM

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We often hear that the world faces an unprecedented crisis of forced displacement. Organizations like the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), International Organization for Migration (IOM), and Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) routinely make such claims. Humanitarian organizations, journalists, scholars, pundits, and politicians across the political spectrum then use this styled fact for competing purposes, from seeking greater protection and relief for refugees to demolishing those same programs. I argue that their shared premise of an unprecedented crisis is empirically inaccurate. It fails to understand the political and scientific processes of producing displacement statistics. An historical institutionalist analysis of the physical or virtual archives of UNHCR, IOM, IDMC, and UNRWA and interviews with 17 agency experts reveal how displacement statistics are created, the gaps between their original purposes and the way they are later used and interpreted, omissions of earlier displacements, expansions of displacement types that create the illusion of skyrocketing increases, and the need for researchers to avoid confusing the statistical record of an agency’s activities with a clearcut record of types of global displacement.

The lecture is jointly organised by the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity (IRIS) and Department of Political Science and International Studies (POLSIS).