All by Jeff Crisp

Who is counting the refugees? Displacement data, its limitations, and potential for misuse

It is impossible to think about refugees, write about refugees, advocate on behalf of refugees or provide refugees with practical support without the use of statistics. And yet scholars and practitioners working on the refugee issue were surprisingly slow to examine the complexities associated with the collection, analysis and dissemination of quantitative data. As I pointed out in a paper published in 1999, “while all of the standard works on refugees are replete with numbers, few even begin to question the source or accuracy of those statistics.” The issue of refugee and displacement statistics is now taken a great deal more seriously than was the case two decades ago. Even so, the issue of displacement data remains problematic.