Seeing Flight as a Non-violent Option: One Way to Change the Discourse about the World’s 60 Million Refugees
Posted Wednesday, 3 Feb 2016 by Erica Chenoweth & Hakim Young
Today, one in every 122 humans living on the planet is a refugee, an internally displaced person, or an asylum-seeker. In 2014, conflict and persecution forced a staggering 42,500 persons per day to leave their homes and seek protection elsewhere, resulting in 59.5 million total refugees worldwide. According to the UN refugee agency鈥檚 2014 Global Trends report (tellingly entitled World at War), developing countries hosted 86% of these refugees. Developed countries, such as the U.S. and those in Europe, host only 14% of the world鈥檚 total share of refugees.
Yet public sentiment in the West has been tough on refugees lately. Resurgent populist and nationalist leaders routinely play to public anxieties about refugees as 鈥渓azy opportunists,鈥� 鈥渂urdens,鈥� 鈥渃riminals,鈥� or 鈥渢errorists鈥� in response to today鈥檚 refugee crisis. Mainstream parties aren鈥檛 immune to this rhetoric either, with politicians of all stripes calling for increased border controls, detention centers, and the temporary suspension of visa and asylum applications.
Importantly, none of these panicky characterizations of refugees is born out by systematic evidence.
- Read more at , where the full text was posted 26 Jan 2016
