Mapping Five Decades of Refugee Research in Southeast Asia: What 1,110 Studies Reveal

Few regions on Earth have been shaped by forced displacement as profoundly as Southeast Asia. Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, the region has absorbed Indochinese boat people, hosted Karen and Shan communities along the Thai-Myanmar border, endured the mass expulsion and statelessness of the Rohingya, and contended with internal displacement driven by civil conflict and catastrophic natural disasters, including the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Yet despite this extraordinary history, the scholarly literature on refugees and forced displacement in the region has never been systematically mapped. A new bibliometric study published in SN Social Sciences by Abang Mohd Razif Abang Muis of Universiti Malaysia Sabah and Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, together with Mohd Nur Hidayat Hasbollah Hajimin and Audry Abel Paulus, now provides the most comprehensive quantitative portrait to date of how this field of research has grown, who produces it, and what themes dominate its intellectual structure.

The research team scoured the Scopus database, one of the largest curated indexes of peer-reviewed literature, for publications on refugee and forced displacement issues in Southeast Asia published between 1975 and 2025. Using a structured search strategy paired with an explicit screening protocol against pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, the authors filtered out records that were only peripherally related to the topic. The final corpus comprised 1,110 publications, a dataset spanning half a century of scholarship on asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, and stateless populations. The analysis was conducted using a combination of bibliometric software: BiblioMagika for data processing, OpenRefine for cleaning and standardising records, and VOSviewer for constructing and visualising co-occurrence networks of author keywords.

Bibliometric analysis is a quantitative science-mapping technique that treats publications, citations, and keywords as data points rather than reading their content in depth. Performance indicators, such as annual publication counts, citation totals, and the productivity of individual authors and countries, describe the volume and impact of a field. Co-occurrence mapping, by contrast, reveals its conceptual anatomy: when two keywords appear together in the same article more often than chance would predict, they are drawn closer together in a network diagram, and dense clusters of connected terms expose the thematic pillars around which a discipline organises itself. This dual approach allowed the researchers to chart both the growth trajectory of Southeast Asian refugee scholarship and the intellectual architecture underpinning it.

The headline finding concerns timing. Publication output remained modest for decades but rose markedly from the 2010s onward, a surge that coincides with the intensifying international visibility of the Rohingya crisis after 2012, when sectarian violence in Rakhine State triggered renewed displacement and drew sustained global media attention. The authors are careful about what this correlation means. Because their data are descriptive, they interpret the association as suggestive rather than causal; the analysis cannot demonstrate that the Rohingya emergency itself drove the increase in publications, only that the two trends unfolded in parallel. Even so, the pattern is striking: a humanitarian catastrophe that unfolded largely within the region appears to have been accompanied by an expansion of the academic literature documenting and analysing displacement.

Equally revealing is what the performance indicators show about who produces this knowledge. Research output is concentrated among a limited group of author affiliations and contributing countries, indicating uneven participation in the indexed literature. This concentration matters for reasons that go beyond bibliometric curiosity. Scholarship on displacement is often produced by institutions far from the displacement itself, and the new study’s evidence of a narrow base of productive affiliations raises familiar questions about whose perspectives shape the research agenda, who has access to publication channels, and how the priorities of international journals interact with the concerns of local communities, host governments, and displaced people themselves.

The thematic mapping is where the study delivers its richest technical contribution. Aggregate author-keyword co-occurrence analysis identified nine coexisting thematic areas. The first cluster concerns refugee health and trauma, a lineage that stretches back to some of the earliest and most highly cited works in the corpus, including studies of trauma and survival among Burmese political dissidents in Thailand published in the mid-1990s and research on the functional health of Cambodians living in border camps. A second cluster addresses Rohingya statelessness and rights, while a third examines legal precarity and access to health services, reflecting the peculiar limbo in which most refugees in Southeast Asia live, since many states in the region are not parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol.

The remaining clusters extend the map across the full breadth of the displacement experience. One area covers asylum governance in the maritime corridor, evoking the irregular boat movements through the Andaman Sea and the policy responses they provoke. Another addresses camp-based displacement and identity, drawing on decades of research along the Thailand-Myanmar border. A sixth cluster concerns internal displacement, conflict, and disasters, encompassing both war-driven displacement and the upheaval caused by events such as the Aceh tsunami. Two further areas focus on women, children, and reproductive health, including studies of menstrual hygiene management challenges facing displaced girls and women, and on the international protection architecture itself, including legal scholarship on how politics shaped the outcome of the 1967 Protocol. The ninth cluster examines protracted displacement and education, including barriers to higher education faced by Burmese refugees in Thailand.

Together, these clusters suggest clear priorities for future research. The authors argue that the patterns point toward comparative studies that span multiple countries and displacement contexts, longitudinal designs that track displaced populations and policy changes over time, and greater methodological diversity across the field. They are equally candid about the limits of their own analysis: the keyword co-occurrence data do not establish how themes changed over time, and studies that fall below the keyword occurrence threshold are invisible to the network. The reliance on a single database, Scopus, also means that grey literature, non-English publications, and work in regional journals not indexed by Scopus remain outside the picture, a constraint the authors acknowledge given licensing restrictions that prevent public sharing of the raw bibliographic records.

The timing of this mapping exercise could hardly be more consequential. UNHCR’s Global Trends reporting continues to document record levels of forced displacement worldwide, and Southeast Asia remains both a source and a destination region for people fleeing persecution, conflict, and disaster. Recent legal scholarship, cited in the study, analyses Thailand’s national screening mechanism as a case of partial acculturation to international refugee law, illustrating how host states in the region are incrementally, and unevenly, building domestic structures for managing asylum. A consolidated evidence base of the kind this study provides gives policymakers, humanitarian agencies, and researchers a shared map of what is known, and just as importantly, of where the gaps lie.

What makes the study notable within bibliometrics itself is its methodological transparency. The authors describe a structured search strategy, an explicit screening protocol, and a documented pipeline through BiblioMagika, OpenRefine, and VOSviewer, with derived datasets available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. No custom code was developed, and the study involved no human participants, requiring no ethical approval. By systematically mapping the knowledge structure of refugee and forced displacement scholarship in Southeast Asia, the team has converted five decades of scattered publications into an organised intellectual geography, one that future studies of regional migration governance and protection regimes can navigate, interrogate, and extend as the forces that displace people across the region continue to evolve.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric mapping of refugee and forced displacement research in Southeast Asia from 1975 to 2025

Article Title: Refugee and forced displacement research in Southeast Asia (1975–2025): a bibliometric analysis of trends and future directions

Article References: Refugee and forced displacement research in Southeast Asia (1975–2025): a bibliometric analysis of trends and future directions. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01855-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01855-1

Keywords: refugee studies, forced displacement, Southeast Asia, bibliometric analysis, Rohingya, statelessness, internal displacement, asylum governance, refugee health, VOSviewer, Scopus, migration governance