Refugees, Diversity and Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa
Despite mixed empirical evidence, refugees have been blamed for spreading conflict in the countries that receive them. This paper hypothesizes that such a relationship largely depends on the resulting change in ethnic composition of refugee-hosting...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099935405182291733/IDU0d2bb8dd60616d040560b5280feaf23c219b2 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37463 |
| Summary: | Despite mixed empirical evidence,
refugees have been blamed for spreading conflict in the
countries that receive them. This paper hypothesizes that
such a relationship largely depends on the resulting change
in ethnic composition of refugee-hosting areas. To test
this, this paper investigates changes in diversity in
refugee-hosting areas across 23 countries in sub-Saharan
Africa between 2005 and 2016. The paper then assesses the
likelihood of conflict in relation to the changing level of
ethnic fractionalization and ethnic polarization. Ethnic
fractionalization measures the probability that two
individuals drawn at random from a society will belong to
two different ethnic groups and thus increases with the
number of ethnic groups present. Ethnic polarization
captures antagonism between individuals and is maximized
when the society is divided into two equally sized and
distant ethnic groups. Refugee polarization is found to
exacerbate the risk of conflict, with a one standard
deviation increase in the polarization index increasing the
incidence of violent conflict by 5 percentage points. Such
an effect corresponds to a 10 percent increase at the mean.
The opposite effect is found for the fractionalization
index. Additional analyses are also conducted based on
individual data. Ethnic polarization increases the
likelihood of experiencing physical assault by 2.1
percentage points. Inversely, the equivalent change in the
ethnic fractionalization index decreases the likelihood of
experiencing physical assault by 1.9 percentage points.
Similar effects are found for interpersonal crime. The
results should not be interpreted as evidence that refugees
per se impact the likelihood of violence. Indeed, there is
no evidence of a significant correlation between the number
of refugees and the occurrence of conflict. Instead, the
analysis points to the risk of conflict when refugees
exacerbate ethnic polarization in the hosting communities.
In contrast, a situation where refugee flows increase the
level of ethnic fractionalization is likely to see an
attenuated risk of violence. This certainly calls for
specific interventions in polarized refugee-hosting communities. |
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