 I'm Salvatore Babona, and today's lecture is Global Refugee Numbers. There are now more than 21 million refugees in the world, a number that seems to be growing every day. Long-term Palestinian refugees from the Arab-Israeli conflicts account for around 5 million of those, but most of the other 16 million refugees in the world were driven abroad by ongoing conflicts that are still occurring. Most new refugee flows are generated by civil wars, which also generate large numbers of internally displaced persons. Unfortunately, civil wars seem to be becoming more common, not less, as international wars diminish in the 21st century. With recent outflows from Syria included, there are now more than 21 million refugees in the world, about 16 million of them of recent vintage. This graphic from the Amnesty International website is a little bit out of date in terms of total numbers, but the rankings are the same. The top 10 source countries of new refugees are Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, and on down the list. The first six of these are all countries engaged in active civil wars, or in the case of Sudan and South Sudan, a civil war that recently led to the birth of South Sudan, while a continuing civil war in Sudan boils under the surface between the government in Khartoum and its western province of Darfur. You have to go down to number 7 on the list, Myanmar, to find people who are being turned into refugees through more conventional mechanisms that were envisaged in the 1951 refugee charter. And even in Myanmar, there are low level civil wars, again bubbling beneath the surface of a country that seems otherwise stable. Central African Republic is involved in a civil war, or recently was. Iraq, of course, since the 2003 US invasion, has been in turmoil for the last 14 years. And Eritrea, again, is not a country currently in civil war. It's a country that was created by a civil war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. In fact, Ethiopia fell off the list of top refugee countries once that civil war was settled and Eritrea became a separate country. Of these top 10 sources, the only one for which most of the refugee flows coming out today are for classic refugee reasons. Discrimination against particular people for their politics and for their minority status. Only Eritrea is the only one of these 10 that fits that kind of classic model of refugee flows. The other nine all have refugee flows resulting from active conflict. Countries with large numbers of internally displaced persons are pretty much the same countries that have large numbers of refugees. But they're, for the most part, countries that are experiencing either civil war or some kind of ongoing civil strife. Like in Colombia, where hopefully in Colombia the recent peace settlement between the rebels fighting the government and the government in Bogota. Hopefully that will lead to the return of people who had been internally displaced by the drug wars and the civil war in Colombia. The top hosting countries for refugees are those that are close to the conflicts. Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan for the Syrian civil war and Pakistan and Iran for the Afghan civil war. Now you'll see there are many other hosting countries that host large numbers of refugees that are not engaged in civil war. The United States and Canada are major recipients of refugee flows. As are the countries of Western Europe, Germany, France, Italy and Sweden all take large numbers of refugees. Also you might be interested to see on this refugee map Russia and China. Russia's refugees largely come from the conflicts in which Russia has been engaged all along its southern border. Conflicts with Georgia, with Ukraine, the turmoil in Central Asia resulting from the breakup of the Soviet Union have all led to refugees coming to Russia. In China, most of the refugees are refugees from conflicts on its border, particularly refugees from Myanmar and Laos from Southeast Asia in general. The association of refugees with civil war has become so close that we almost consider them the same thing. We kind of think of refugees as people fleeing civil war. But it's easy to forget that the global refugee system wasn't really designed for civil war. The global refugee system was designed to prevent a catastrophe along the lines of the Holocaust. A situation in which a group within a country was so discriminated against by that country that it resulted in the threat of genocide and ultimately in the case of the Holocaust did result in genocide. So if you look at the 1951 refugee convention, a refugee is someone who has a fear of being persecuted for race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group, or political opinion. Refugees are not simply people caught in the crossfire when there is a conflict in their country. That said, fleeing a conflict is a very natural and understandable thing to do in time of war. And any humane country in any humane society must shelter people whose lives are at risk for war in their own countries. But this has led to massive politicization of refugee problems because most of today's refugees don't fit neat under the technical definitions of refugees that resulted at the end of World War II. Historically, most refugees returned to their home countries at the end of the conflict, or at least most refugees in the late 20th and early 21st century, between 1990 and 2010. That was certainly the case. As you can see from this chart of refugee returns, in the 1990s and early 2000s, sometimes two or three million people a year returned to their countries at the ends of civil war. As I mentioned, the civil war between Ethiopia and Eritrea caused millions of refugees to leave Ethiopia in the 1980s and 1990s. But once Eritrea became independent and the war was over, Ethiopians returned to Ethiopia, which is now one of the fastest growing countries in the world. Since 2010, or really since the late 2000s in general, this trend seems to have been moving the other direction. Today, most people do not return to their countries of origin. Refugees increasingly seek to stay in the countries where they seek refuge. And that again has made the politics of humanely accepting refugees even harder. It's one thing to ask people to accept temporary refugees for a short time until it's safe for them to go home. It's a different political question to ask people to welcome permanent immigrants into their society. And this has set up the big conflict between people who see refugees in humane terms as people to be helped and people who see refugees as a threat, people to be kept out. Key takeaways. First, we have to remember that the long-term Palestinian refugees from the Arab-Israeli wars are not really part of contemporary refugee debates. In fact, they even have their own special United Nations agency, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, that administers Palestinian refugee camps and handles Palestinian refugee issues. Palestinians do not fall under the UNHCR. Second, most refugees today are seeking refuge from civil wars. They're just trying to get out of the crossfire. And this generates, first, many internally displaced people. They don't necessarily flee to other countries. They may flee within their own countries. But second, it creates a lot of confusion about the application of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Finally, that 1951 Refugee Convention itself simply was not designed with civil wars in mind. And as a result, we've seen an extreme politicization of refugee issues. Refugee issues are not handled simply on a case-by-case basis by national courts as they should be. Instead, they have become major issues in elections, as we certainly have seen in the last several elections in Australia, but as also seen in the United States and in Europe, where refugee flows have become an important political issue. Thank you for listening. You can find out more about me at SalvaturbaBonus.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly Global Asian newsletter.