From Protection to Persecution: Determinants of State Violence against Refugees

• In Event: The Political Effects of Forced Migration on States

Abstract

While most states are signatories to international treaties recognizing the rights of refugees, we see a significant variance in the way host governments treat refugee groups in their territory. This paper examines the conditions under which states fail to comply with their legal commitments and violate the physical integrity of refugees. We argue that changes in the security environment of host governments, such as civil conflicts, transnational terrorist attacks or militarized interstate disputes, increase the risk of state violence against refugees. States exposed to a security crisis may victimize refugees for several reasons, whether it is to punish violent dissidents (coercive responsiveness), dissuade future inflows of refugees that may exacerbate the ongoing crisis (preemptive repression) or simply to distract public attention (scapegoating). We also consider the mediating effects of domestic political institutions and argue that democracies’ behavior towards refugees is particularly sensitive to security crises. Using a novel global data on anti-refugee violence between 1996 and 2015, we find empirical support for our expectations. Our results are robust to different operationalizations of security crisis and democracy as well as accounting for alternative explanations such as state capacity, economic scarcity and cultural threats.

Authors

• Burcu Savun, University of Pittsburgh

• Christian Gineste, University of Pittsburgh