How Refugee Repatriation Shapes Conflict in Destination Communities

• In Event: The Intergroup Politics of Identity and Conflict

Abstract

The number of forcibly displaced people has grown precipitously in the past two decades. As of 2020, more than 38 million people are displaced across borders, with most fleeing war or chronic insecurity in their origin countries. Increasing conflict duration has exacerbated this trend, causing the protraction of many displacement situations. As a result, refugees are acutely vulnerable, facing tenuous legal status, political exclusion, poverty, poor access to services, and outright hostility. Progress on conflict resolution requires programmatic solutions to refugee crises. Refugee return is widely regarded as the preferred solution, and millions of refugees have returned to fragile and conflict affected origin countries in the past decade. Disentangling the effect of refugee return on conflict is a thorny empirical challenge because returnees may eschew repatriation as a result of ongoing or past violence. To tackle this question, we leverage the sudden imposition of the Trump Administration’s so-called "Maximum Pressure” sanctions on Iran in 2018. The sanctions rapidly cratered the Iranian economy, spurring the mass return of some 700,000 Afghan refugees from Iran to Afghanistan. Exploiting historical returnee settlement patterns and previously unreleased combat records, we find that sanctions-induced refugee return had cross-cutting effects, increasing insurgent violence, but reducing social conflict. Many returnees were impoverished, making them a ripe target for insurgent recruitment. Consistent with this hypothesis, sanctions-induced return had heterogeneous effects on insurgent violence, increasing use of labor-intensive combat, decreasing capital-intensive insurgent attacks, and increasing the effectiveness of counterinsurgent bomb neutralization missions. Social capital and local institutions for dispute resolution significantly offset the risks of refugee return for communal violence. Our study provides causal evidence demonstrating links between refugee return and political and social conflict. These results are economically significant, highlighting unintended consequences of sanctions and clarifying the conditions under which refugee return affects conflict. Supporting social capital and legitimate, local institutions are key antecedents for safe refugee repatriation.

Authors

• Christopher William Blair, Princeton University

• Benjamin Curtiss Krick, Duke University