The Powerful (Vagueness of) Numbers?

Abstract

The Global Trends Reports represent UNHCR’s key tool to share information about annual developments in relation to displacement, primarily through numbers. Among the many subjects covered, they often also address different forms of accommodation. But how do such quantifications produce (non)knowledge and link with the humanitarian landscape? This article explores accommodation categories, quantifications, and local categorizations as presented in the Global Trends Reports published from about 2003 to 2020. While the numbers appear to display precise knowledge on refugees’ whereabouts, gaps prevail in the reports: accommodation categories remain undefined, calculations are partly unclear, and local recategorizations occur suddenly without explanation. This article argues that these issues produce nonknowledge, and that the reports’ continuous attention to accommodation data simulates refugees’ controllability and governability.

Strategic non-regulation as migration governance

“…In this paper, we therefore focus on non-regulation by state actors. However, our conceptual work in this paper could fruitfully be put into conversation with other work that evidences how inaction and ambivalence might be strategically used by humanitarian and development organizations (Cullen Dunn, 2012;Fejerskov, Clausen and Seddig, 2023) or international organizations (Krause, 2022;Stricker, 2019) active in the migration governance field.…”

“…A growing literature concerned with unknowing, non-knowledge and ignorance in migration studies has tried to locate inaction at the level of policy implementation, sometimes seeking to show intent and at other times to demonstrate convenience (Bradley, 2023;Eule et al 2019, Canning, 2018Krause, 2022;Scheel, 2021). To offer ways to operationalize inaction and pinpoint its convenient aspects in policy implementation, we specifically highlight recent work on the 'politics of non-knowledge' by Aradau and Perret (2022) and 'strategic ignorance' by Borrelli (2018).…”

Regimes of power/non-knowledge in global politics

“…The entanglement of knowledge and non-knowledge, of legibility and illegibility also features across other practices that make migration knowable and governable, such as statistics. Stephan Scheel and Funda Ustek-Spilda (2019) and Ulrike Krause (2022) have shown that migration is not easily intelligible and quantifiable. For example, popular data representation tools such as the UNHCR's Global Trends Reports and the IOM's Global Migration Flows Interactive App (GMFIA) are inescapably unreliable (see Heller and Pécoud 2020).…”