The Heterogeneous Impact of Events on Violence during the German Refugee Crisis

• In Event: The Politics of Migration, Refugees, and Conflict

Abstract

Previous literature on political violence has frequently examined the role of structural determinants to establish which local conditions lead to ethnic conflict (Braun and Koopmans 2010; Falk, Kuhn, and Zweimüller 2011; Krueger and Pischke 1997; Olzak 1990). Less attention, however, has been placed on the temporal dimension of such violence. This narrow focus on where, not when, political violence occurs neglects substantial changes in hostility over time and depicts an overly static representation of intergroup conflict.

Against this backdrop, my paper investigates anti-immigrant violence in Germany between 2014 and 2016, focusing specifically on the timing of attacks. Germany experienced a surge in violence amid an influx of asylum seekers to the country, with attacks on refugee shelters increasing 18-fold between 2013 and 2015. Importantly, this increase occurred irregularly and in notable temporal clusters. This paper concentrates on these fluctuations in violence over time and identifies that threatening events involving asylum seekers spark periods of heightened anti-immigrant attacks and intergroup hostility.

While some studies have analysed the impact of threatening events on attitudes towards immigrants or levels of hate crime (Desmond, Papachristos, and Kirk 2016; Hopkins 2010; Jäckle and König 2018; Legewie 2013), they tend to focus on the effect of a single incident. This paper, on the other hand, identifies each salient event between 2014 and 2016 that involved or was blamed on asylum seekers, to examine how the degree of violent backlash varies between the events. Additionally, the paper goes beyond previous studies by examining whether threatening events, other than changing the frequency, are also able to influence the very predictors of intergroup conflict. Specifically, it analyses whether the relationship between structural determinants and anti-immigrant violence changes following a threatening event. On the one hand, events may foreground particular stereotypes, thus increasing the influence of certain structural conditions. On the other hand, events may incite nationwide aggression against asylum seekers that extends beyond structural differences, thus weakening the association.  

Results show that anti-immigrant violence increases substantially following certain threatening events. They also reveal considerable heterogeneity in the impact of these events: after controlling for structural determinants, contagion dynamics, seasonal fluctuations as well as media salience of the refugee issue, the 2015 New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne (NYE) stands out among all threatening events in Germany because it led to a dramatic increase of anti-immigrant attacks in subsequent weeks. Comparing the surge in violence following the NYE event to the more moderate impact of domestic terrorist attacks of the same year indicates that discrepancies in events’ effects seem not to be related to straightforward measures of severity, but rather to more complex underlying mobilisation dynamics. Importantly, the NYE event not only increased the amount, but also the distribution of violence: in the weeks following the incident, anti-immigrant attacks increased disproportionately in previously less hostile regions. This suggests that the NYE event incited a broad, nationwide hostility, thus decreasing the influence of pre-existing local conditions and leading to a more even distribution of violence across the country. Disaggregated analyses reveal that the increase in anti-immigrant attacks following the NYE incident was largely made up of a surge in minor crimes, while more extreme forms of violence (i.e. arson attacks and assaults) were less affected. Shocking events may thus be particularly effective at mobilising new and less radical offenders, while perpetrators of more serious crimes may be less susceptible to situational influences.

More generally, the paper highlights that previous literature focuses too narrowly on where, but not when conflict occurs, and stresses the need to incorporate threatening events into the study of political conflict. This is particularly important given that this research shows that such events can not only influence the amount, but also the very structural determinants of conflict.

Author

• Arun Frey, University of Oxford