The Global Crisis of Forced Displacement: where are we and where are we heading?

Abstract

The entry into force of the EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum in June 2026 is only the latest in a series of measures by which Global North states are narrowing access to international protection. This is happening at a moment when the number of forcibly displaced people, 117.8 million at the end of 2025, remains near record highs. This brief traces how forced displacement evolved from a legitimate instrument of statecraft into a violation of international law and argues that today’s crisis is not primarily one of numbers but of political will. The very states that built the postwar protection regime are systematically retreating from it. Despite the fact that, according to available statistics, the numbers of forced migrants will continue rising, the most likely trajectory in protection is the normalization of forced displacement as an ad hoc managed condition, in which treatment depends less on need than on where people come from and how much they are worth politically.

On June 12, 2026, the New Pact on Migration and Asylum came into force across the European Union. The Pact’s language revolves around ideas such as solidarity, human dignity, and a fair sharing of responsibility. At the same time, it introduces rules meant to make it easier for member-states to control their own territory and borders. It is a response to the still growing tide of populist, anti-immigration slogans and to member-states’ push to strengthen their say over who is admitted under asylum procedures, who is not, and under what terms and within what scope of international protection can be granted. The Pact is also meant to solve the difficult problem of how to actually carry out the return of asylum seekers who have received a negative decision when their applications for protection were examined. According to the Pact’s critics, the new rules on “safe third countries” undermine the very foundations of refugee protection, foundations that European states themselves laid back in the interwar period.

The debate about the Pact is far from over, and neither are the efforts of EU states to widen the range of tools for dealing with asylum seekers in the EU, whether by agreeing to create deportation centers or through the so-called externalization of asylum processing. EU states are also pressing the Council of Europe to have the European Court of Human Rights change its case law on how to interpret breaches of the ban on turning people seeking protection back to places where they face persecution (the principle of non-refoulement, in French), a principle that forms the backbone of the entire refugee protection system, both globally and at the level of individual world regions. There are many more changes being introduced at the level of the EU and its individual member-states. As of May 2026, not all of the 27 member-states managed to submit their Pact implementation plans in Brussels on time. Non-governmental organizations have long been warning that some of these provisions will in effect contribute to the slow dismantling of a coherent protection system in the EU. Supporters of the changes, those who take a clear-eyed view of the securitization of migration that feeds the populist narrative, put it this way: to move forward, if we want the EU asylum system to survive at all, and perhaps even for the Union itself to survive, we have to knock the arguments out of the populists’ hands and take a step towards “restoring control,” to borrow the language of Poland’s migration strategy. National policies designed to limit migration have little to do with actual migrant numbers, but that hardly matters. The fight for votes is waged with cheap and simple slogans in which words like “migrant” and “refugee” do the work. They play well on citizens’ emotions and can be used to tackle problems that have nothing to do with regulating migratory flows. And this is not just a Polish case. Today, the same processes are unfolding in essentially every country of the wealthy North, though there are notable exceptions, to mention only Spain’s different approach or the fairly steady attitude to migration in general shown by successive Canadian governments. Beyond the Global North, we can certainly single out two national approaches to migration, including its forced varieties. On one side are states that never joined the instruments of the international protection regime or the efforts to protect internally displaced persons (IDPs). The approach of South Asian and Middle Eastern states is especially telling here. On the other side, many African and Latin American states are becoming champions of the fight to uphold normative and institutional commitments in the area of international protection and assistance to other categories of forcibly displaced people, discussed ahead.

In the countries of the Global North, there is very little room today in the migration debate for substantive discussion and for political decisions grounded in knowledge. This picture of how our European and, more broadly, wealthy world relates to migrants, and especially to so-called forced migrants, is a good starting point for asking whether we really are, as numerous analyses suggest, living in a time of global crisis of forced displacement, and if so, toward what kind of world we are heading as it currently narrows the application of legal and institutional principles for granting these people protection, principles that have been in place for many decades.