Mapping Forced Migration
Seventy-five years of expulsions, deportations, repatriations, and escapes, traced country to country.
The viewer below traces three quarters of a century of forced displacement outside the OECD: 848 documented episodes of expulsion, deportation, repatriation, and escape between 1950 and 2025, hand-compiled from 478 published sources. Filter by event type and period and the chord diagram redraws every bilateral flow; click a country to unfold its origins and destinations as a Sankey diagram, with a fully sourced trend line underneath.
Research Questions
- Which country pairs account for the largest forced population transfers since 1950?
- How has the mix of expulsions, deportations, repatriations, and escapes shifted across eras?
- How uncertain are the historical counts — and where do they diverge from UNHCR records?
The dataset
There is no single registry of forced migration, so this one was built by hand: each of the 848 cases records an origin, a destination, the affected group, a timeframe, and a lower, mean, and upper estimate of the people displaced — every row anchored to one of 478 published sources, from academic expulsion datasets to press archives and UNHCR statistics. Where UNHCR figures exist, the dataset carries them alongside its own estimates, making the divergence itself measurable.
The chord diagram
The main view arranges every country on a circle and draws each displacement flow as a ribbon between origin and destination — arc length encodes a country's total volume, ribbon width the size of each bilateral flow. Toggle the four event types or narrow the year range and the diagram recomputes instantly. Clicking a country opens a Sankey view of just its flows: where its displaced people came from on the left, where they were driven to on the right.
Trends you can audit
Beneath the flow views, a line chart tracks the selection over time, with shaded bands spanning the lower and upper estimates — uncertainty is displayed, not hidden. Numbered citation markers on the curve link each data point to a live bibliography panel listing the exact sources behind the current view, and the raw case table is one click away. Every ribbon on the screen can be traced back to a published record.
This project has an interactive viewer. It works best on a larger screen, but you can open it full-screen here.
Forced Migration — Interactive ViewerInterested in the data behind this?
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