The State of The World's Refugees 2000: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action

UNHCR began as a small organization, with a three-year mandate to help resettle European refugees who were still homeless in the aftermath of the Second World War. Since that time, the organization has continually expanded to meet the growing needs of refugees and other displaced people.

The State of the World's Refugees 2000 provides a detailed history of half a century of international humanitarian action on behalf of refugees and other displaced people, covering all the major refugee emergencies of the last 50 years. It examines the way in which each succeeding crisis has helped shape an expanding body of refugee law, and it analyses the international community's changing response to the problem of forced migration. Above all, it places humanitarian action in the broader political context and examines the fundamental link between displacement and international peace and security.

• Preface by the UN Secretary-General
• Foreword by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The early years
• Chapter 2: Decolonisation in Africa
• Chapter 3: Rupture in South Asia
• Chapter 4: Flight from Indochina
• Chapter 5: Proxy wars in Africa, Asia and Central America
• Chapter 6: Repatriation and peacebuilding in the early 1990s
• Chapter 7: Asylum in the industrialized world
• Chapter 8: Displacement in the former Soviet region
• Chapter 9: War and humanitarian action : Iraq and the Balkans
• Chapter 10: The Rwandan genocide and its aftermath
• Chapter 11: The changing dynamics of displacement
• Annexes
• Further reading