Syrians fleeing the bloodletting at home and a fast-growing web of other crises across the world accounted for the spike in the displaced, the UNHCR said in its annual Global Trends Report.
At the end of last year, 51.2 million people had been forced from their homes worldwide, the highest figure of displacement since World War II, said the UNHCR.
That's six million more people than at the end of the previous year, reflecting what the agency described as important undercurrents in international relations. At the end of 2012, there were 45.2 million displaced in the world, according to the agency.
"The world has shown a limited capacity to prevent conflicts and to find a timely solution for them," said U.N. High Commissioner Antonio Gutteres.
"Today, we not only have an absence of a global governance system, but we have sort of an unclear sense of power in the world," Gutteres told reporters in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, where the global report was launched Friday.
The massive increase was mainly driven by Syria's civil war. By the end of last year, 2.5 million Syrians had become refugees in neighboring countries and more than 6.5 million had been displaced within Syria, the U.N. agency said.
