The Global Refugee Crisis: Causes, Consequences, Solutions

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The world is facing a global refugee crisis unprecedented since the 1945-1952 period. There are currently almost 68 million people forcibly displaced.
Professor Hansen’s lecture will review the causes of mass forced migration and explore the solutions. It will argue that solutions are not found in the global north; they are rather found in the global south — where most refugees are. It ends by making a series of policy recommendations: that resources be concentrated in the global south where the refugees in fact are; that refugees be given economic, political and social opportunities in the countries to which they flee; that nascent efforts to encourage refugee self-sufficiency be expanded; that refugee access to education in particular be expanded and that donor support aim to improve life for both refugees and locals so that refugees may come to be seen not as an intolerable burden but as an economic and political asset.

BIOGRAPHY
Randall Hansen is Interim Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Full Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration. He works on Immigration and Citizenship, Demography and Population Policy and the Effects of War on Civilians. His published works include Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance after Operation Valkyrie (2014), Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race and the Population Scare in 20th Century North America (2014), and Fire and Fury: the Allied Bombing of Germany (2009). Professor Hansen has also co- edited a number of books on immigration and public opinion in Western democracies. He appears regularly on TVO’s The Agenda and has written for and been quoted in the national and international press.