Major Refugee Crises and Their Geography

The Syrian civil war, which began with the government's violent suppression of protests in March 2011 and escalated into full-scale armed conflict, produced the largest single refugee population in the world for most of the following decade. By the early 2020s, roughly 6.8 million Syrians remained registered as refugees, the great majority hosted in neighboring states rather than in Europe: Turkey alone has hosted well over 3 million Syrians under a "temporary protection" regime since 2014, making it, for years running, the country hosting the largest refugee population on earth, ahead of Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, all of which absorbed proportionally far larger shares of their own population than any European state. Lebanon's roughly 800,000 registered Syrian refugees represent, relative to its small population of about 5.5 million, one of the highest refugee-to-host ratios anywhere in the world, straining housing, water, electricity, and school capacity in a country already destabilized by its own economic collapse after 2019.