Revolt by Nadav Eyal

Author:Nadav Eyal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ecco
Published: 2020-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

New Wars

I have already referred to the global challenge posed by the birthrate crisis. The solution would seem obvious—to welcome and assimilate the roughly 80 million refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced persons.1 According to the UN, we are living through the worst refugee crisis since World War II.2 During the age of responsibility, political leaders and their citizenry were prudent compared to today. In that period of relative stability, there were far fewer displaced people. During the 1990s, with the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the outbreak of war in the Balkans, the number of refugees began to rise significantly.

Within eight years, the number of displaced persons doubled, from 20 million to over 40 million people; by 2019 it had reached 79 million.3 Millions more have since joined this fellowship, at a staggering pace. Most recently, much of this surge has been due to the conflict in Syria. Approximately two-thirds of the Syrian population, more than 10 million people, have fled their homes since civil war broke out in 2011. Some migrated outside the state’s boundaries—3.5 million live in Turkey, for example—but others became refugees in their own country.4 Even so, the Syrian civil war, with its enormous political repercussions, is only part of the international humanitarian crisis.

The current refugee crisis stands out because it is not the consequence of a global conflict. In the 1940s, tens of millions of people lost their homes and wandered in search of safe havens. But they were displaced in a brutal world war. Despite the economic crises of the 2000s, the world has arguably become more secure and prosperous during the past two decades. In fact, the data shows that people are much safer from conflict today than they ever have been before.5 We have not experienced another world war, a great depression, and COVID-19 has yet to cause mass displacement. The number of interstate wars is at a historic low. There is almost no country in the world that is engaged in war with another country. That is nearly unprecedented in the modern era. So why have so many people been displaced?

Notably, less than a third of the displaced people are refugees who left their countries. Such refugees numbered about 26 million people in 2019. Over 45 million are internally displaced persons—that is, they remain within the borders of their country but have been forced from their homes on account of war, hunger, or expulsion. They find themselves in gigantic camps or in impoverished neighborhoods on the outskirts of big cities and cannot return to their homes.6

The huge increase in the number of internally displaced persons is the result of internecine strife and the loss of freedom of movement across borders. The latter almost goes without saying: today, states have more ways to keep people from crossing their borders than they have ever had in the past. There are so-called smart fences equipped with movement sensors, closed-circuit television, satellite technology, mobile phone networks that can monitor people’s locations, biometric passports, and retinal scans.

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