Institutions & the Emergence of Conflict After Civil War: Evidence from Burundi

• In Event: After Exile: Refugee Return and the Politics of Displacement

Abstract

Conflicts between returning and non-migrant populations after civil war often appear idiosyncratic, rooted in the particular histories and local customs of each nation. Power struggles following changes to the national language policy in Rwanda seem to have little to do with competition to rent apartments in post-war Bosnia or resentment over lack of access to government jobs in South Sudan. However, each of these conflicts is a symptom of one of the most common, and disruptive, processes of civil war: displacement. Across contexts, collective experiences of fleeing across borders or surviving war in-country create the possibility for new group identity divisions to emerge after civil war based on where individuals were physically located during wartime: those who stayed and those who left and returned. Where return-migration creates the opportunity to divide communities along these lines, I argue that local institutions determine the form and intensity in which these divisions manifest. In this paper, I present a theory to explain the making of migration-based identities after civil war. I argue that latent migration-related cleavages become salient and antagonistic when post-conflict institutions (such as property rights, cultural traditions, or language laws) intentionally or unintentionally provide differential dividends to individuals based on their migration history. I then use ethnographic data collected in Burundi and Tanzania between 2014 and 2016 to illustrate the theory’s dynamics. I demonstrate that in post-civil war Burundi, formal and informal institutions, such as land courts and patrimonial inheritance practices, created a situation where individuals believed that certain aspects of their life during peacetime – like their access to land, ability to gain employment, and likelihood to succeed in a school – were contingent on their migration history. As such, they more strongly identified themselves and others as “returnees” or “stayees.” I then show how changes in the land court’s practices exacerbated the perception of preferential treatment for returnees, fueling widespread, violent land conflict between returnees and non-migrants. This article contributes to our understanding of the formation of political identities (and identity-based conflict) beyond the traditional categories of ethnicity, religion, and nationality. Moreover it provides important insight for policy-makers concerned with post-conflict peacebuilding about how social processes of civil war, like migration, can alter the sources of violent conflict during peacetime.

Author

• Stephanie Schwartz, University of Southern California