1960 to 2000

End of the colonial era and post-Cold War

These incidents

displaced at least

Decolonization movements swept over Asia and Africa in the 1950s and '60s, starting with the Indian subcontinent, where 14 million people were displaced by the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Wars of independence and the civil conflict that followed sent millions flooding out of Algeria, Congo, Angola, Nigeria and others into neighboring countries, and newly minted military regimes often uprooted ethnic communities even after peace was restored.

During the 1970s and '80s, the Cold War’s proxy battles displaced millions of people from Afghanistan and between countries in the Horn of Africa. With the declining power of the Soviet Union, many ethnic and nationalist communities in Eastern Europe began to agitate for self-determination, resulting in mass movements between Armenia and Azerbaijan and within Georgia and Tajikistan. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, millions of ethnic Russians flowed into Russia from the newly independent states.