Paper details

Paper authors	Ulrike Krause
In panel on	Trust in Humanitarian Numbers? Bringing Critical Data Studies into Humanitarian Studies
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

The global trends reports have become UNHCR’s key annual reporting tool about previous-year developments in forced migration. Their release on World Refugee Day (June 20th) demonstrates the relevance UNHCR ascribes to these reports. They address various subjects primarily based on statistical data and each report contains comprehensive statistical annexes. These give the impression of full transparency, as the reader has access not only to the explanations in the reports but also the numbers, the ‘pure facts,’ in the annexes. But how do such quantifications produce (non-)knowledge? The paper focuses on refugees’ accommodation forms, and explores accommodation categories, quantifications, and local categorizations as presented in the global trend reports from about 2003 until 2020. Drawing on McGoey’s concept of ‘strategic ignorance’, I find that the quantification of accommodation portrays a level of ‘hard facts,’ one that is instead inconsistent and unstable. Accommodation categories lack definitions in the reports and change over time. Readers are thus left to interpret meanings. The numbers that fill the categories are at times vaguely explained, and calculations hard to trace. This also applies to local accommodation categorizations; sudden changes from one year to the next happen without explanation as to how or why—or even that they have occurred. These issues indicate that the reports produce not only selective or fragmented knowledge but also strategic non-knowledge, while giving the impression that the exact numbers facilitate the governance of refugees.

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