What explains forced migration? The answers are fragmented. Conflict studies examine the logic of violence that prompts some people to flee, but refugees who have left their places of origin fall off the radar screen unless they are implicated in further violence or post-conflict reconstruction. Policy-oriented refugee studies take as their starting point people who have already crossed an international border to seek sanctuary, but these studies often pay little attention to those who cannot leave. International migration studies have highly developed theories of labor migration but have been slow to integrate insights of economically driven movement with flight from violence and persecution. By contrast, the systems approach focuses on the connections among stages of displacement in different countries to illuminate what the silos inadvertently conceal. A longitudinal case study of one extended Syrian family in multiple countries reveals how household decision-making interacts with policies across the globe.