How Refugees Shape National Boundaries by Challenging Them

• In Event: Migration and Border Politics in Africa

Abstract

A common claim about contemporary African politics is that citizens feel low attachment to their nation relative to subnational identities tied to religion, language, and ethnicity. This project offers a theory of boundary-making in which pressures generated from weak borders lead citizens in border regions to perceive stronger national identities. I argue that the influx and settlement of refugees make salient for citizens living in border regions the negative consequences (real or perceived) of their nation-state's weak borders. These citizens feel compelled to turn to other national boundaries of exclusion that are social, legal, or symbolic. Through elite interviews, focus groups, and an original geo-coded survey experiment of over 2000 citizen respondents living around a rapidly expanding refugee camp in rural Tanzania, this project finds that the presence of refugees substantially increases local citizens’ attachment to their national identity and decreases their attachment to ethnic and subnational identities. Whether this increase in national solidarity leads to more active citizenship is unclear; these local citizens, by observing the influx of humanitarian aid for refugees, are unlikely to demand for or contribute to better public goods provision for their own communities.

Author

• Yang-Yang Zhou, University of British Columbia