More than a decade after the 2011 Arab uprisings, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) continues to face unprecedented levels of displacement. Lebanon hosts the largest number of refugees per capita (one in eight), followed by Jordan (one in fourteen) and Türkiye (one in twenty-three) (see figure 1). Millions of Iraqis, Syrians, and Yemenis also remain internally displaced, with 2.6 of the 4 million Yemeni internally displaced individuals facing life-threatening food shortages. Across the region, the ongoing war in Ukraine has increased food and fuel prices and further disrupted supply chains, exacerbating the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and raising the cost of delivering humanitarian assistance to refugees and displaced people. In the coming decades, the effects of climate change will also compound the existing conflict-driven reasons that lead individuals to flee their home regions or countries, whether droughts, rising sea levels, food insecurity as a result of crop failure, or desertification.
These challenges—conflict, poor governance, climate change, and a worsening economic picture—have created immense difficulties for migrants, refugees, and other vulnerable populations originating from and residing in the MENA region. These include the ongoing fallout from the Syrian civil war and the lack of a durable solution for most Syrian refugees; the international displacement of Iraqis, Yemenis, and Syrians, which is only compounded by pressures of climate change; and the lack of safe migratory options for citizens and non-nationals in North Africa. As Europe remains focused on brokering deals to contain migrants and refugees within MENA host states—despite attempts at improved international responsibility sharing, such as the 2018 Global Compact for Migration—countries across the region will continue to grapple with the political, economic, and societal impacts of migration. Without investments in climate resilience, responsive governance, and equitable social policies and without opportunities for regular migration as an adaptive mechanism, displacement may exacerbate existing inequalities and social tensions.
Safe Return for Refugees and Regional Stability
The war in Syria, the biggest driver of human-caused displacement in the Middle East over the last decade, has transformed the region and left millions displaced with no prospect of safe return. Little has changed in terms of the circumstances—repression, regime violence, and the exploitation of sectarian and religious divisions—that caused individuals to flee in the first place. Since 2011, this situation has contributed to regional insecurity and impacted domestic politics in a range of host countries, including Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Türkiye (see figure 2). Although the implications of the conflict continue to reverberate, the war effectively ended in 2019, with President Bashar al-Assad’s regime reasserting control over most of the country, leaving smaller regions in the northwest and northeast under the sway of two opposition groups, the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), respectively.
Over the past five years, an international push for refugees to return to Syria had gained momentum among major host states, driven partly by a decree the Assad regime issued in 2018 offering amnesty to Syrian men who fled the country to avoid military conscription—but not to those who had joined opposition forces. In reality, returning to Syria is a gamble. Amnesty International has documented dozens of cases of Syrian intelligence officers subjecting men, women, and children to detention, torture, sexual violence, and forced disappearance. By the end of 2022, only approximately 350,000 Syrians had returned to Syria, though actual figures may be higher as returns also occur via informal routes.
Assad has normalized relations with a number of Arab countries, including the UAE and Bahrain, and in early 2023 there were indications of a possible rapprochement between Assad and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Observers have pointed to how the arrangement would serve both sides. Syria hopes to remove SDF forces from the areas containing oil fields in northeast Syria and needs support from Ankara to do so. In turn, Türkiye hopes to both eliminate the Kurdish armed presence and organizational capacity in Syria and, likely, attempt to return Syrian refugees from Türkiye to Syria under the auspices of the United Nations and other international organizations. Erdoğan also wants to exploit the idea of a Syrian-Turkish rapprochement to strengthen his domestic support ahead of the scheduled May 2023 presidential election.
While it is unlikely that the majority of the nearly 4 million Syrians in Türkiye would return, full normalization could still be devastating. Türkiye has financed the Islamist militants of the Syrian National Army (SNA), who fought against Syrian Kurdish forces on behalf of Ankara, and it also hosts the Syrian National Coalition, the largest coalition of Assad opponents. Since the summer of 2022, Erdoğan has been asking these groups for reconciliation with Damascus—an impossible request from the point of view of the opposition. While Türkiye has returned refugees to Syria previously, in apparent contravention of international law, those who returned were able to reside in regions where the Assad regime had not established full control. However, if the rapprochement succeeds in fully quashing the Syrian opposition, many of the returnees would be at high risk of persecution and retaliation.
The devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake in February 2023 gravely impacted nationals as well as refugees and displaced people in both Türkiye and Syria. The Turkish city of Gaziantep, the epicenter of the first quake, hosts 500,000 Syrian refugees, with hundreds of thousands of others residing throughout southeast Türkiye. The Turkish public has shown some resentment toward Syrians since at least 2014—waxing and waning depending on domestic political events—but the earthquake reaggravated tensions, with Turkish nationals resentful of the $40 billion spent by the government since 2011 to host Syrians in light of the perceived inadequate response to the earthquake. In northeast Syria, even before the earthquake, 4.1 million people, predominantly women and children, were relying on humanitarian assistance to survive. As a result of the Syrian regime’s choke hold, supported by Russia, on aid entering opposition-controlled areas, UN assistance could initially only enter Syria from Türkiye via the Bab al-Hawa crossing, which was damaged by the quake. The Syrian government eventually allowed for two additional crossings from Türkiye to open to UN aid convoys, but even then, many residents in the region were forced to rely on makeshift methods of rescuing families and individuals trapped under the rubble, and many were left without shelter.
Lebanon officially hosts approximately 850,000 registered Syrian refugees, in addition to an estimated 650,000 unregistered Syrians. There are nearly 250,000 migrant domestic workers in the country and approximately 210,000 Palestinians (including Palestinians from Syria) registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The devaluation of Lebanon’s currency by over 90 percent and the COVID-19 pandemic have led to unprecedented poverty rates, which disproportionally impact refugee and migrant populations and poorer host communities. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that 90 percent of Syrians in Lebanon live in extreme poverty, and UNRWA calculates that 93 percent of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon also live in poverty. Furthermore, Lebanon as a whole, and at-risk communities in particular, face acute food insecurity; Lebanon imports 80 percent of its wheat, and of that figure, 80 percent historically came from Ukraine and 16 percent from Russia. The country’s storage capacity was greatly diminished following the Port of Beirut explosion and the destruction of the port silos in August 2020.
Jordan hosts approximately 600,000 registered Syrian refugees, 700,000 unregistered individuals, and 17,000 Palestinians from Syria. While not facing the same economic crisis as Lebanon, 80 percent of Syrians in Jordan live in poverty. At the same time that the costs of basic necessities including food and healthcare have risen and livelihoods have been slashed as a result of the pandemic, international organizations that provide assistance to refugees (such as the World Food Programme) have cut programs due to funding shortfalls.
Despite these dire situations, and even with small numbers of Syrians voluntarily and involuntarily returning from Lebanon and Jordan just as they have from Türkiye, most Syrians will remain in the countries where they currently live in the medium term. A 2019 survey of Syrians in Lebanon suggested that refugees will not willingly go home before local conditions are deemed safe and economic livelihoods can be supported, even with worsening conditions in host countries. Issues of property restitution and an inability to obtain necessary documentation, including birth certificates and passports, are also major barriers to return. According to international legal norms, refugee repatriation should only happen under conditions that can ensure safety and dignity and should not contravene the principle of nonrefoulement, meaning that refugees cannot be sent back to a location where their lives could be in danger. In the Syrian case in particular, forcibly returning refugees to a country that continues to be governed by the regime from which they fled could restart cycles of violence and repression, ultimately making the possibility of future conflict more likely. Moreover, the economic devastation as well as food and fuel insecurity in Syria have meant that even areas loyal to the Assad regime throughout the war have recently expressed discontent. Aside from issues of safety, refugees and internally displaced returnees will face dire economic circumstances, making it more likely that individuals will attempt to remain in host countries—Jordan, Lebanon, or Türkiye—in the medium term.
Internal Displacement as a Growing Challenge
The intersection of climate change, economic instability, and poor governance is making internal displacement an increasingly difficult challenge in many Arab countries. In Iraq, displacement reached a peak in 2016 as a cumulative result of the U.S. invasion, sectarian violence, and the expansion of the Islamic State. Since then, overall displacement has declined, but Iraq still hosts more than 1 million internally displaced people (IDPs), as well as nearly 5 million IDP returnees, many of whom have struggled to fully reintegrate and continue to require humanitarian assistance. In addition, 1.5 million displaced Iraqi and Syrian refugees reside in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, where 25 percent of the population is displaced. In 2021, the government of Iraq took steps to address IDPs with its National Plan to End Displacement. In reality, though, the closure of camps across the country led to premature returns that particularly impacted women-headed households, leaving many individuals and families to deal with administrative hurdles that prevented them from properly accessing government services and welfare benefits. Most recently, in February 2023, the government announced a new plan to transition IDPs away from humanitarian assistance provided by international actors to a government-run social assistance program, though whether this will run into similar administrative barriers remains to be seen.
The repatriation of the approximately 30,000 Iraqi nationals in Syria’s al-Hol camp, most of whom are women and children, has also proven extremely difficult. Individuals are first taken to Jeddah-1 camp, located in Iraq’s Nineveh province, where they spend several months or more undergoing security screenings and so-called rehabilitation, though even successfully repatriated individuals continue to struggle with community acceptance and administrative issues.
Finally, existing displacement issues in Iraq will be compounded by rising temperatures and drought, as well as the possibility of future political tensions leading to mismanagement of the shared Euphrates-Tigris water basin. Southern Iraq already faces water insecurity, and more than 90 percent of Iraq’s population is dependent on the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, which are at historically low levels. Iraq’s Indigenous Marsh Arabs are exemplars of the risk that climate change poses to traditional ways of life. In addition to historical political actions, such as those taken by former president Saddam Hussein, to destroy their livelihoods and environment by intentionally draining Iraq’s marshlands, climate change threatens to further displace this population, forcing many into urban areas where issues such as overcrowding and a lack of services might fuel discontent.
In Yemen, there are more than 4 million IDPs, and the country also hosts nearly 1 million refugees and asylum seekers, primarily from the Horn of Africa. Climate change was a dire issue in Yemen prior to the civil war, but eight years of fighting has further stressed limited resources, and the breakdown of basic government services as well as blockades by warring factions have compounded existing water and food shortages. The weaponization of water has also exacerbated the acute famine in Yemen and prolonged conflict. While the climate crisis impacts all Yemenis, IDPs are at particular risk, as their temporary homes are especially vulnerable to flooding and those residing in camps are less likely to have regular access to drinking water and food. Women and girls have also been acutely affected, as they are usually responsible for gathering water, leading them to undertake unsafe journeys into conflict-impacted areas with greater exposure to land mines.
While Iraq and Yemen are two of the most harrowing examples of how years of conflict can interact with poor governance and climate change to produce and endanger IDPs, they represent cautionary tales for how countries across the region might be impacted in the future. As seen in Iraq, the arrival of IDPs can strain existing resources, potentially leading to discontent or even violence, while Yemen demonstrates how the effects of climate change can reify the human challenges created by ongoing conflict. As most displaced individuals globally remain within their own country, rather than moving across international borders, the multifaceted set of factors that lead to the creation of IDPs will be an increasingly salient issue going forward.
The EU’s Ongoing Containment of Migration
Since Europe’s political crisis in 2015 in reaction to the arrival of asylum seekers, most of whom originated from Syria, migration has played an increasingly important role in European relations with MENA countries. On the heels of what Europe perceived as a successful migration deal with Türkiye in 2016, whereby Türkiye would accept Syrian refugees arriving in Greece in exchange for €6 billion and other diplomatic benefits, Italy agreed to a deal in 2017 (endorsed by the EU) with the UN-backed Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA). The EU agreed to assist the Libyan Coast Guard in apprehending migratory boats departing Libya and to financially support the establishment of detention centers (referred to as local reception centers) in the country. In exchange, the GNA would further prevent irregular migration toward Europe and repatriate migrants and asylum seekers willing to return to their origin countries. More brazen than the EU-Türkiye deal, the agreement with Libya ignored known human rights abuses, and, shortly after its implementation, journalists revealed images of migrants being traded at slave auctions. EU financial and material support also has implications for Libyan citizens, as armed groups affiliated with the GNA have carried out torture, abductions, and extrajudicial executions. While EU funding was initially correlated with a decrease in migrant arrivals via the central Mediterranean route, the number of arrivals increased from around 35,000 in 2020 to 105,000 in 2022, illustrating that Europe’s policy of trapping migrants in Libya not only comes at an enormous human cost but is also ineffective.
Neighboring Egypt was not initially as interested in migration agreements with Europe, but President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has become one of the EU’s most praised partners on preventing irregular migration. Egypt is the most populous state in the Arab world, with just over 100 million citizens residing in the country, in addition to approximately 250,000 asylum seekers and refugees, though Sisi has famously exaggerated this number at 5 million refugees. The country faces a debt crisis that preceded the 2011 uprising but that has worsened drastically over the last decade, and Cairo has been slow to implement the fiscal reforms required by its 2016 loan from the International Monetary Fund. As a major importer of wheat, Egypt has also been hugely impacted by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent war, and in January 2023, the Egyptian pound hit a new low when the government implemented a more flexible exchange rate. Egypt’s large population and economic woes have made Europe fearful of large-scale emigration from the country, leading the EU to seek Egypt’s assistance in preventing its own nationals from departing and also in intercepting and returning migrant boats departing from Libya. In exchange, Europe has been willing to offer development and security aid, including the provision of military equipment. In September 2022, the EU confirmed that €23 million would be allocated to Cairo over the remainder of the year, in addition to €57 million in 2023, to further equip Egyptian authorities to carry out “search and rescue” missions and conduct “surveillance at land and sea borders.” Yet, as with Libya, there are very few provisions in place to prevent negative spillover effects and violence from authorities toward migrants and Egyptian citizens alike. Additionally, by praising Egypt’s capabilities as a partner on antitrafficking and irregular migration prevention, the EU helps to distract from international criticism over the Egyptian government’s ongoing human rights abuses.
Morocco was already deeply involved with various forms of European externalization efforts prior to 2015, but since then Rabat has sought to take further advantage of the increased funding allotted for EU migration partnerships. Morocco and Spain intensified their cooperation around the issue of migration in 2018, with Spain’s secretary of state for migration declaring that Spain would be Morocco’s “voice” in Europe. However, the relationship quickly fell apart in 2021 when Brahim Ghali, the leader of the Polisario Front, was allowed to enter Spain to receive medical treatment for COVID-19, leading Morocco to allow approximately 6,000 African migrants to enter the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in one day. Bilateral relations were later repaired in 2022, which also meant that border policing returned to normal, leading to the deaths of at least twenty-three asylum seekers and migrants attempting to enter Spain’s other enclave, Melilla, in June.
Tunisia also has a long history of cooperating with Europe on migration, but European interest in the country increased greatly after 2020. The pandemic-related economic downturn had led to increased pressure for Tunisians—and to a lesser extent, migrants that had been residing in Tunisia—to migrate irregularly to Europe. With President Kais Saied’s increasingly authoritarian turn since 2019 and his inability to address the country’s economic issues, it is unlikely that even European-financed border measures will prevent the irregular migration of Tunisian nationals, especially as the composition of those departing is increasingly middle-class and composed of entire families, illustrating the desperation felt by citizens across socioeconomic strata.
Migration Challenges Exacerbated by Climate Change
More than a decade of war has eroded states’ abilities to mitigate the effects of climate change, leaving key populations—especially migrants, refugees, and displaced populations—vulnerable to climate impacts because nonresidents and noncitizens are often accorded lower priority for services or because they may not have legal status in a host country. Looking forward across the region, the numerous impacts of climate change will have varying effects on migration and displacement, as states have vastly different adaptation capabilities. For example, populations in poorer countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Syria will feel the impact acutely. In Iraq, recent summer temperatures have reached peaks of 125 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to disturbed livelihoods, heatstroke, and, in some cases, death. In comparison, Gulf states have the economic means to mitigate the effects of extreme heat, even though a rise in global temperature will particularly impact them. The UAE has the world’s highest per capita water consumption levels, and predictions indicate that population growth could lead the country to deplete its freshwater resources in the next fifty years. It is unclear whether Gulf countries will be able to maintain their extremely high levels of labor migration absent any meaningful rights to workers, as environmental pressures increase and the possibility of oil and gas depletion looms on the horizon.
As discussed in the previous section, the vast majority of individuals displaced by climate change will migrate within their own countries; only some will be able to cross international borders. According to the World Bank, up to 19 million individuals across North Africa could be forced to move internally by 2050 due to climate change impacts including water scarcity, sea level rise, or crop failure. Projections of climate-induced displacement across the MENA region are equally worrying. It is also important to note that displacement related to climate change is likely to be gendered, with the UN estimating that 80 percent of individuals currently displaced by climate change are women. As sudden-onset climate events lead to a breakdown of infrastructure and governance, the likelihood of human trafficking greatly increases, which has a disproportionate impact on women and girls. Even when women do not migrate themselves, they may be expected to assume duties traditionally left to men after an incidence of crop failure or water scarcity causes a male head of household to migrate in order to search for alternative livelihood opportunities. However, in many Arab states, women may not have the same authority as men over legal issues or may be discriminated against in land ownership or inheritance laws.
It is not possible to conceive of an adequate response to future climate-induced displacement across the MENA region without reversing the trend of European countries attempting to contain migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees within MENA, a trend that has been amplified since 2015. Despite the adoption of the nonbinding Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration and its companion agreement, the Global Compact on Refugees, in 2018, the compacts have had little impact on the pattern of states outsourcing migration prevention, with deleterious effects for migrants and refugees. And while lip service is paid to funding climate adaptation policies as part of the EU’s external migration management aid—through pots of money such as the 2015 EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa—the majority of funding goes to further securitizing borders and supporting regimes with grave human rights records.
Rich countries of the Global North—and in this case, particularly countries of the EU—must be prepared to increase opportunities for mobility, including through humanitarian visas, private sponsorships, educational opportunities, and temporary work permits for those forced to leave their countries due to precarious situations. At the very least, the EU must reverse course on its untenable policy of containing displaced populations within MENA host states and subsequently turning a blind eye to their plight. Ultimately though, governments across the MENA region will have to address pervasive issues including poverty, inequality, and corruption in order to mitigate the current and impending impacts of a changing climate for their populations, including both citizens and migrants. It was these same unaddressed issues that gave rise to the uprisings of 2011, the heavy-handed response to which drove the subsequent displacement of the last decade. Yet, with the advent of climate change and the increasingly serious challenge it will pose in the coming years, the stakes are even higher than they were twelve years ago. Governments in the region, with the support of the international community, must focus on providing more equitable services, developing inclusive socioeconomic policies, and instating climate change mitigation processes that benefit all populations in order to avoid exacerbating the very underlying factors that induce further displacement.