ABSTRACT
The post-1990s world emerged from a major redrawing of the borders of Europe and a transformation of the map of the world. As borders and regimes changed, old and new national and minority questions have been opened. This chapter provides the basic frame of the migration and refugee dissensus in Europe and explores the background to the migration and refugee debates. It sets out key empirical data about the volume and flows of migration, refugees and displaced persons across the globe and a historical periodisation and typologies of migration leading up to the migration and asylum crisis. Leo Lucassen attempted to compare the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ to the early 1990s. The remarkable stability of the global stock of migrants, despite the dramatic rise in the numbers of refugees, illustrates the importance to developing more nuanced reading of migration and politics, and how governments, states, international actors and NGOs and societies react to migrants.
