MIGWAR: Investigating the interactions between civil wars and migration
Marie Sklodowska-Curie individual Fellowship, project Number 657861. October 2015 - September 2017.
Beneficiary: Marion Mercier; Supervisor: Fabio Mariani; Host institution: IRES, Louvain-la-Neuve.
Summary of the context, overall objectives and results
Poor countries are often plagued by civil wars. They are also, in many cases, emigration countries. Anybody interested in the development of such countries must understand to what extent these phenomena are interrelated, and how they interplay with each other. If it is pretty clear that civil wars push people to leave the country, it remains understudied how diasporas play a role in the emergence and evolution of violent conflicts.
Indeed, the interactions between diasporas and conflict have roughly been overlooked by the economic literature, in spite of the very suggestive pieces of evidence provided by related research fields and of the very important policy questions that it raises – in particular, how to optimize the contribution of diasporas to peaceful development. Based on case studies such as those of Erytrea or of Sri Lanka, the qualitative literature underlines diverse mechanisms through which diasporas have intervened in the evolution of violence in their home country, either as peace-builders or as peace-wreckers.
This project aims at investigating the joint dynamics of civil conflicts and migration in developing countries. It articulates two axes, which mobilize two different methodological approaches. The first part of the project builds a theoretical framework to characterize how diasporas and civil wars interact together, accounting for the endogeneity of both migration and violence. The second part of the project aims at empirically testing the theoretical predictions derived from the model, relying on recent disaggregated data. Through a multi-disciplinary perspective, nourished by the findings of the qualitative research and relying on various economic tools – both theoretical and empirical – this project builds the first comprehensive investigation of the diasporas – conflict nexus.
The theoretical investigation has yielded a framework in which we can understand how the different channels through which diasporas can affect violence at home interplay. The model shows that, while large enough diasporas tend to support their groups’ war effort in the homeland through financial contributions, this does not always translate into more violence, as a reinforced strike force of migrants’ group of origin can deter its rivals in the homeland to go fight against a stronger enemy. In relation with the case studies documented by the qualitative literature, the model allows to understand why, in some cases, diasporas have fueled conflict at home, while in other contexts they have not, in spite of their intent to do so, and while in others they have acted as peace-builders.
The empirical investigation develops a strategy disaggregated at the level of the actors of civil conflict. Ethnically-based insurgent groups involved in violence at home are associated with refugee flows emanating from the same ethnic background. We find a significantly negative correlation between the size of refugee flows and the intensity of violence involving their ethnic group in the homeland, which points to a peace-building average effect of abroad-living communities of refugees. As predicted by the theoretical model, the relationship is heterogeneous across certain country- and group-level characteristics. In particular, we find that refugee flows are more likely to be associated with a de-escalation of violence in poor, small countries, with an important recent history of violence.