Understanding the links between migration, mobility and human security

To get a sense of the breadth and nature of human insecurity in the context of migration and mobility, it is useful to examine key data, including global indices. Human insecurity connected to disaster (such as floods, typhoons or wildfires), for example, affects countries around the world regardless of development levels, with both developed and developing countries exposed to significant and growing risks.³³ The consequences of disaster-related crises, however, tend to be more profound in developing countries, which can lack the resources to invest in both risk reduction programming and disaster (and post-disaster) response.³⁴ Further, there is strong recognition that the world is currently gripped by a range of interlinked crises that are seriously impacting least developed countries, with profound negative implications for millions of people globally.³⁵

Table 1 correlates data for selected countries on the Human Development Index (HDI), Human Freedom Index (HFI), Global Peace Index (GPI), Fragile States Index (FSI), IDPs (conflict and violence), new internal displacements (disaster), and refugees and asylum-seekers. Several key aspects are evident in Table 1. First, countries that rank highly on the HFI tend to perform well on the HDI, a composite measure of countries’ performance across several dimensions, including health, education and standard of living. However, it is notable that some very high HDI countries rank poorly on human freedom.

Second, the table shows that countries that rank highly on the GPI also tend to perform well on the HDI. While there are some exceptions – countries such as Bhutan, Cambodia, Ghana and Senegal rank relatively highly on the GPI, compared to their ranking on the HDI – the general trend suggests that higher human development goes hand-in-hand with high levels of peace.

Third, countries that rank towards the bottom of the FSI – indicating that they are more stable – seem to have high levels of human development, while those that are highly fragile – in almost all cases – have a low HDI. Also clear, however, is that not all countries that are stable (with a low FSI score) have high human development. In other words, stability does sometimes coexist with low HDI, suggesting perhaps that stability is a necessary but not a sufficient factor for development.

Fourth, countries that score high on the peace index also produce fewer refugees and asylum-seekers and have a lower number or are without conflict-induced IDPs. The number of refugees and asylum-seekers originating from countries such as Singapore, Chile or the Republic of Korea in 2021 starkly contrasts with the number from less peaceful countries such as Myanmar, Ethiopia, Yemen and South Sudan. This reality is especially acute in countries such as the Syrian Arab Republic, where protracted conflict means that more than half the population is still forcibly displaced.³⁶ The glaring differences in the number of refugees and asylum-seekers – between high income, peaceful countries and more fragile and less developed countries – are also visible in the number of conflict-induced IDPs. Less secure countries, perhaps unsurprisingly, have a much larger number of conflict-induced IDPs, with countries such as Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Somalia together having millions of IDPs, while more stable countries, such as Costa Rica, Malaysia and Bhutan all recorded zero conflict-induced IDPs in the same year.

Fifth, the data on new internal disaster displacements show a very different pattern, highlighting that disaster displacement is more linked to geographical issues than to development issues connected to any of development, human freedom or human rights, peace or fragility. We can see that, new displacements occurred across the spectrum of HDI ranked countries. The growing impacts of climate-change related disaster displacement is resulting in more countries being affected over time, and far outstripping the number of countries affected by internal displacement due to conflict and violence. Further discussion on internal displacement is in Chapter 2 of this report.

Sources: Human Development Index 2021: UNDP, 2022b; Human Freedom Index 2022: Vásquez et al., 2022; Global Peace Index 2022: IEP, 2022; Fragile States Index 2022: FFP, 2022; Refugees and asylum-seekers: UNHCR, n.d.; IDPs: IDMC, 2023; new internal displacements: IDMC, 2023.
Note: * means ranking not available for that country.

While displacement internally and across borders is clearly associated with increased insecurity, international migration outside of displacement – and particularly in terms of human development that encompasses economic, social and political aspects – also has significant human security implications. The long-term trend data show that there is growing “mobility inequality”, with most international migration now occurring between rich countries at the exclusion of poorer countries (see Chapter 4 in this report).