After Exile: Refugee Return and the Politics of Displacement

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel analyzes the political causes and consequences of forced displacement and refugee crises. Although a wealth of research focuses on the effects of refugees on host countries, less work examines the long-term dynamics of refugee crises, especially during the final phases of conflict. The panel’s papers use multiple empirical approaches, including survey and survey experimental data, interviews, ethnography, as well as cross-national regressions to shed light on both national and international actors' role in producing forced migration and what happens after displacement.

Such research is more pressing than ever with an unprecedented 68.5 million people around the world currently displaced. Academic research is essential to policymaking and program design in response to forced displacement. When do people forced to flee return home? What effects does this return have on postwar local conflict after people return? What factors shape state-sponsored demographic change? How does refugee civil society respond to prolonged conflict and conflict termination?

The panel will contribute to the comparative politics of forced displacement by pushing the conversation beyond the questions of “who migrates” toward understanding the political roles displaced populations play during and after conflict and what causes the end of refugee crises, as opposed to the beginning alone. Discussant Stathis Kalyvas’s extensive expertise will stimulate the conversation and highlight the substantive and theoretical importance of this important yet understudied topic. In addition to the discussion of the papers per se, Professor Kalyvas will offer important guidance on the emerging research agenda around long-term refugee crisis dynamics, at a critical moment when many researchers are turning to study this important phenomenon.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 52: Migration and Citizenship

Individual Presentations

• From Expansion to Fragmentation: Aid and Activism among Syrian Refugees - Rana B. Khoury, Northwestern University

• Dynamics of Refugee Return: Theory & Evidence from Syrian Refugees in Lebanon - Daniel Masterson, Stanford University; Ala Alrababah, Stanford University; Jeremy M. Weinstein, Stanford University; Dominik Hangartner, London School of Economics; Marine Casalis, Immigration Policy Lab - ETH Zurich

• Institutions & the Emergence of Conflict After Civil War: Evidence from Burundi - Stephanie Schwartz, University of Southern California

Chair

• Stathis N. Kalyvas Yale University

Discussant

• Stathis N. Kalyvas Yale University