UN 2015 Report: Forced Displacement Hits a Record 59.5 Million

UN, 2015: Forced Displacement Hits a Record of Nearly 60 Million

A Syrian mother from Tel Abyad waits with her children in Akçakale, Şanlıurfa province, Turkey, in June 2015. Photo: Umit Bektas / Reuters

In June 2015 the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, reported that 59.5 million people had been forced from their homes by the end of 2014, the highest number it had ever recorded. More than half of the world's refugees were children. War in Syria was the single biggest cause, but at least fifteen other conflicts had flared up or restarted in the previous five years. This article explains what the 2015 report found, why the numbers jumped so quickly, and how the picture has changed in the decade since.

The headline numbers

UNHCR's annual Global Trends report for 2014, released in Geneva on 18 June 2015 under the title "World at War", counted 59.5 million forcibly displaced people. A year earlier the figure had been 51.2 million; ten years earlier it had been 37.5 million. The rise of 8.3 million in a single year was the largest the agency had ever seen.

That total combined three groups that are often confused:

Refugees, people who have crossed an international border to escape danger: 19.5 million.
Internally displaced people (IDPs), who fled their homes but stayed inside their own country: 38.2 million, the biggest group by far.
Asylum seekers, whose claims for protection were still waiting for a decision: 1.8 million.

So when headlines spoke of "60 million refugees", they were stretching the word. Most displaced people never left their own country. The distinction matters, because refugees have specific legal protections that IDPs usually do not.

The chart above, from the UNHCR report, shows how displacement climbed through the 2000s and then rose steeply after 2011. During 2014 alone, about 13.9 million people were newly displaced, an average of roughly 42,500 people every day.

The agency offered two comparisons to make the scale easier to grasp. One in every 122 people on Earth was a refugee, an IDP or an asylum seeker. And if all the displaced people formed a nation, it would have been the 24th largest country in the world.

Syria and the other wars behind the surge

The war in Syria, which began in 2011, was the main reason for the leap. By the end of 2014 about 7.6 million Syrians were displaced inside the country and nearly 3.9 million had fled abroad. Syria overtook Afghanistan as the world's largest source of refugees, a position Afghanistan had held for decades.

Syria was not alone. UNHCR counted at least fifteen conflicts that had broken out or reignited in five years: eight in Africa (including Côte d'Ivoire, the Central African Republic, Libya, Mali, north-eastern Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan and Burundi), three in the Middle East (Syria, Iraq and Yemen), one in Europe (Ukraine) and three in Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar and Pakistan). Long-running crises in Afghanistan and Somalia also kept millions on the move, many of them stuck for years in camps or temporary housing.

The report warned that few of these crises had been resolved and that most were still pushing new people out of their homes. One telling statistic made the point: in 2014 only 126,800 refugees were able to go back to their home countries, the lowest number in 31 years. When wars do not end, people cannot go home.

Who carries the burden

A common belief in wealthy countries is that they take in most of the world's refugees. The data shows the opposite. According to the report, 86% of refugees were living in developing regions, often in countries bordering the conflict they had fled. About a quarter were hosted by countries on the UN list of least developed nations.

Turkey had become the world's top host, with 1.59 million Syrian refugees registered at the end of 2014. As the chart shows, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran and Ethiopia followed. Lebanon's case was especially striking, because it is a small country that had taken in well over a million Syrians. Such hosting puts heavy pressure on schools, hospitals, housing and jobs in places that already struggle.

António Guterres, then the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and now the UN Secretary-General, called it "a paradigm change" and an unchecked slide into a new era of mass displacement. He appealed for an equally unprecedented humanitarian response, and for countries to renew their commitment to protecting people fleeing war and persecution.

Europe's crisis and the global response

The report also drew attention to the Mediterranean, where a record 219,000 people had crossed by sea in 2014, and where boats from North Africa and Turkey were carrying growing numbers of people towards Europe. Within weeks the issue dominated European politics. Over 2015, more than a million refugees and migrants crossed the Mediterranean, and at least 3,771 drowned trying. In September the photograph of two-year-old Alan Kurdi, a Syrian boy found dead on a Turkish beach, made the human cost impossible to ignore. Germany received more than 440,000 asylum applications that year.

Just days before UNHCR's report, Amnesty International had published its own study, The Global Refugee Crisis: A Conspiracy of Neglect, calling it the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War. Amnesty urged world leaders to hold an international summit and asked every country to ratify the UN Refugee Convention.

That convention, adopted in Geneva in 1951 and widened by a 1967 Protocol, defines a refugee as someone outside their country with a well-founded fear of persecution because of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. Its core rule, known as non-refoulement, forbids sending refugees back to a country where they face serious danger. Around 146 states are parties to the convention.

The response, in the end, was mixed. Some countries opened their doors, while others built fences. In March 2016 the European Union and Turkey agreed a deal under which Turkey would take back many people arriving irregularly on the Greek islands, in return for €6 billion in EU support. Crossings to Greece fell sharply, but rights groups criticised the deal for shifting responsibility rather than sharing it.

Common myths about displacement

"Most refugees head for Europe or North America." Most stay in neighbouring countries, and most displaced people never cross a border at all.
"Refugees and migrants are the same thing." A migrant may move for many reasons. A refugee has fled persecution or war and has special protection under international law.
"Displacement is temporary." For many families it lasts years or even decades, as the record-low return figures for 2014 showed.

What has happened since 2015

The 2015 figure, shocking as it was, turned out to be a waypoint rather than a peak. Displacement kept rising for a decade, driven by new and continuing wars in places such as Syria, South Sudan, Myanmar, Ukraine, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

UNHCR's Global Trends report published in June 2026 counted 117.8 million forcibly displaced people at the end of 2025, roughly double the number that made headlines in 2015. That total included 41.6 million refugees and 68.7 million internally displaced people. For the first time in a decade, though, the global total fell, largely because more people returned home to countries including Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan and the DR Congo. Many of those returns are to fragile places where rebuilding a life is very hard. UNHCR's current head, Barham Salih, has argued that ending major conflicts is the only way to let millions more go home safely and in dignity.

The lesson of the 2015 report still holds. Displacement figures are, above all, a measure of unresolved wars. Aid can ease the suffering, but only peace brings the numbers down.

Sources: UNHCR, 18 June 2015: Worldwide displacement hits all-time high as war and persecution increase; Wikipedia: 2015 European migrant crisis; Wikipedia: Refugee Convention; Africanews, 12 June 2026: UNHCR figures for 2025. Photo: Umit Bektas / Reuters. Charts: UNHCR Global Trends 2014. Original news report: RT.

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