Flee or Die: Forced Displacement, a Weapon of War like Any Other

Debates on today’s armed conflicts often focus on drones, artificial intelligence, military budgets or new geopolitical imbalances. They overlook the most widely used weapon of contemporary wars — one that costs almost nothing to those who wield it, appears in no arms catalogue and directly targets civilians: forced displacement. At the end of 2025, 117.8 million people were displaced by conflict and persecution, including 68.7 million within their own countries, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). These figures do not merely measure violence: they reveal its logic.

Emptying a territory of its inhabitants is not an indirect consequence of armed conflict; it is an objective in its own right.  Forced displacement has long been regarded as collateral damage, a regrettable but inevitable consequence of fighting. The wars of the 2020s disprove this interpretation: emptying a territory of its inhabitants is not merely an indirect consequence of armed conflict; it is an objective in its own right. Bombing entire neighbourhoods, destroying water and electricity infrastructure, starving the population, ordering “evacuations” from which there is no return: these are all means of achieving a lasting demographic outcome and winning the war. Exodus does not merely accompany war; it wins it.

In Sudan, Gaza and Ukraine, Forced Population Transfers in Plain Sight

Sudan is the most striking — and most overlooked — example of this. Since April 2023, nearly one in three Sudanese — some 15 million people — have fled, either within the country or across its borders, according to the International Organization for Migration. The fall of El-Fasher in October 2025 forced more than 100,000 people onto the roads. In Gaza, virtually the entire civilian population has been repeatedly displaced from one end of the Palestinian enclave to the other. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights describes this as ethnic cleansing. For many others, these incessant displacements form part of a policy of annihilation that should be seen as genocide, an allegation at the centre of the case South Africa has brought against Israel before the International Court of Justice. In Ukraine, as early as March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued its first arrest warrants for the illegal deportation of children to Russia; Kyiv cites a figure of 20,000 children, of whom only a tiny minority have returned.

International law, however, was not caught off guard: it has long clearly and firmly prohibited the forced displacement of civilians. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 prohibits forced transfers and deportations from occupied territory, and Additional Protocol II of 1977 prohibits the displacement of civilians in internal conflicts, unless the security of the civilians involved or imperative military reasons so demand. The Rome Statute classifies it as both a war crime and a crime against humanity, whilst the 2009 Kampala Convention requires African states parties to establish arbitrary displacement as a distinct offence in their criminal legislation.

Applying International Law Is a Matter of Political Will

The problem is thus not only a normative one; it is one of enforcement and the political will that underpins it. On 6 October 2025, the International Criminal Court found Janjaweed militia leader Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman guilty of 27 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the forcible transfer of population, before sentencing him in December to 20 years’ imprisonment. Although this judgment is under appeal, it remains the ICC’s first conviction for Darfur, more than 20 years after the events took place, while the region is once again in the grip of violence. This delay shows that impunity still has a comfortable lead.

The right to asylum is being undermined at the very moment when forced displacement is becoming a method of warfare. A second, less visible front is just as decisive: displacement as a weapon of war achieves its full effect only when civilians driven from their land are left to fend for themselves with no prospect of protection. Yet in 2026, as the Geneva Convention on Refugees marks its 75th anniversary, the right to asylum is under greater threat than ever. Outsourcing of border controls, pushbacks at the border, agreements to return people to third countries: states are stepping up measures designed to keep at bay those driven from their countries by war. Human and financial resources are collapsing at the same rate: the UNHCR lost around 30% of its available resources in 2025 and cut nearly 5,000 posts. The right to asylum is being undermined at the very moment when forced displacement is becoming a method of warfare.

Naming, Documenting and Rejecting a Policy of Fait Accompli

Three imperatives arise from this bitter reality. First, to name: forced displacement is not a humanitarian accident but a crime that must be recognised as such. Second, to document and prosecute, even when those responsible appear to be beyond reach: arrest warrants and criminal prosecutions of those responsible hinder their movements, weigh on negotiations and ensure that their deeds are not forgotten. Finally, we must refuse to allow peace to ratify the map redrawn by the force of expulsion. No agreement should validate the fait accompli of ethnic cleansing, nor set aside the right of return, lest it reward the method and invite its repetition.

Wars that drive out civilians and a world that closes its doors to them: it is from this convergence that forced displacement derives its formidable effectiveness, becoming a weapon of war in its own right. Neutralising it requires not so much the invention of new rules as the application, at long last, of those we already have; for in our interconnected world, where atrocities unfold before our very eyes, no one can claim they did not know.