ABSTRACT
It is not easy to determine what differentiates refugees from other migrants and no defi nite agreement has been reached on this point. However, it appears that when all the variables have been examined, what remains is that refugees had to leave as a result of factors which in the last analysis were not primarily economic and they did not make a decision with primarily positive connotations. What all refugees have in common is that they left their country of origin because a dramatic change jeopardised the life they were leading, although this change need not always be sudden. If things had continued as before the change, they would have stayed. This brings us back to the involuntary character of refugee movements as expounded by Kunz (1973) and Zolberg et al. (1989).
