The number of people forcibly displaced by wars and persecution fell for the first time in a decade last year, the United Nations refugee agency said on Thursday.
But the slight decline is no cause for celebration, because it resulted primarily from such people returning home, often by force, to face insecurity and turmoil, the U.N. said.
“Returns that are not safe and returns to countries that are involuntary are not solutions,” Barham Salih, the U.N. refugee agency chief, told reporters in Geneva, citing his own experience as a former fugitive from repression in Iraq. “They risk becoming the beginning of a new displacement cycle.”
Worldwide, there were nearly 118 million forcibly displaced people in 2025, the agency said in a yearly report — a decrease of about 4.4 percent from the previous year. That included about 41.6 million refugees who had fled across international borders and nearly 70 million people displaced within their own countries.
About 14.7 million refugees and internally displaced people returned home last year — 50 percent more than in 2024, and the second highest number of returnees since records began over half a century ago, the U.N. said.
More than a million people returned to Syria, where the collapse of the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad has produced an uneasy transition and hopes of reconstruction. But in Afghanistan, nearly two million refugees returned mainly because they were pushed out of Pakistan and Iran, returning to an impoverished state in the grip of a hunger crisis.
“The numbers reflect misery on a historic scale, people returned to countries mired in crisis, most with no choice, while every route to safety collapsed around them,” David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, said in a statement on Thursday.
The U.N. also warned that wars are still upending people’s lives across the world.
Sudan’s yearslong civil war alone accounted for the displacement of more than nine million people within the country’s borders last year. By the end of March, the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran had internally displaced 3.2 million people within that country, and by mid-May, Israel’s assaults in Lebanon had pushed more than a million people from their homes, the U.N. said.
“Nearly one-fifth of the population has already been displaced,” Mr. Salih said of Lebanon. “This is truly unacceptable and we must make sure this does not become a new normal.”
The refugee agency also expressed concern about the millions of people trapped in prolonged displacement, often in conditions of acute poverty and hardship.
In 2025, seven out of 10 refugees had lived in exile for at least five years — in some cases, for decades — with no immediate prospects of leaving camps in poor countries where living conditions are often precarious. Most of those refugees came from just seven countries, including Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Myanmar.
Mr. Salih said his agency intended to cut the number of people in long-term displacement by half in the next decade, mainly through voluntary returns. Ending a handful of conflicts would allow millions to return to their homes, he said.
But he also worried about a widening gap between the need to resettle millions of asylum seekers and the willingness of states to take them. The number of people accepted for resettlement fell to 81,000 in 2025, down from 188,000 a year earlier.
“That figure must increase,” Mr. Salih said, adding: “Every dangerous sea crossing and every death in the desert represents a failure of the international community to provide safe and legal alternatives to people who have no other option.”
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