(iPoster) Peacekeeping, Terrorism, and the Outflows of Refugees

• In Event: Poster Session: Security and the Politics of Military Cooperation

Abstract

While some United Nations Peacekeeping Operations contribute to reducing the outflows of refugees from conflict-affected countries, others fail to contain this trend. Why this is the case? Existing literature has yet to offer a systematic explanation for this puzzle. This article proposes the concept of "comprehensive security," which serves as the nexus for both material/ non-material security and current/future security. With this concept, we argue that the motivations for refugees to move out of their home countries could be explained through their self-evaluations of the comprehensive security of their home countries. While the size of the peacekeeping personnel deployment links up to the material and current situation dimensions of security, the number of terrorist attacks indicates the non-material and future evaluation dimensions of security. Therefore, we forecast that with the increase in the size of peacekeeping personnel, the fewer terrorist attacks, the less likely that refugees would flow out of their home countries. Leveraging the compiled dataset of the outflows of refugees between 1991 and 2023, as well as an illustrative case of the Democratic Republic of Congo, our argument is robustly supported. This research, on the one hand, offers a coherent analytical framework for the outflows of refugees; on the other hand, it has important policy implications for governments to maintain the social stabilities of conflict-affected countries.

Authors

• Yiyi Chen, Lanzhou University

• Xulan Jiang, University of Chicago