"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. This paper looks at the politics of refugee numbers. The notion of 'politics', here, is used in its broadest sense, to denote the efforts of individuals and institutions to pursue their own interests and to influence the behaviour of others.