"Who has counted the refugees?" UNHCR and the politics of numbers

Despite the centrality of statistics to the field of refugee studies, scholars working in this area
have been remarkably inattentive to the issue of quantitative data. While all of the standard
works on refugees are replete with numbers, few even begin to question the source or
accuracy of those statistics. Scholars have generally been content to rely on figures offered by
the two leading producers of refugee statistics - UNHCR and the US Committee for Refugees
(USCR) - despite the fact that the figures presented by the two organizations very often differ!
The existing literature on refugee statistics is itself extremely meagre, much of it focusing on
the technical and methodological dimensions of the issue.2 To the best of the author’s
knowledge, no substantive article has ever been published on the politics of refugee numbers.