Refworld and UNHCR

Darfur refugee camp, Chad, March 2005, Wikimedia Commons

How do you snapshot the world? Via yet another conventional economic report? Via an ecological report?

Or via an objective mapping of the world’s migrants and minorities? Refworld, a UNHCR site, is a vast resource. Everything is covered. There is historical information.

The present world map is also a line from which to proceed backwards historically.

Refugees, victims of state-directed population displacement, persecuted minorities, persecuted majorities, victims of human-traffickers, economic migrants, are obviously historically-exposed. If you lead a secure private life (though families can make the least public life insecure), or are a privileged migrant, you can pretend that you are living outside history. Refworld offers maps of those living in history.

Sample: the Ahmadis of Pakistan and elsewhere.

(Richard, if he reads this – a comment will tell – will rightly ask what “outside history” means. But we know what we mean, roughly. You are historically-exposed to the extent that, because of external factors, you are not, or do not feel, in control of your life. History as disturbance.

Toynbee on being “outside history”.)