Refugees, Diversity and Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa

Despite mixed empirical evidence, refugees have been blamed for spreading conflict in thecountries that receive them. This paper hypothesizes that such a relationship largely depends on the resulting changein ethnic composition of refugee-hosting areas. To test this, this paper investigates changes in diversity inrefugee-hosting areas across 23 countries in sub-Saharan Africa between 2005 and 2016. The paper then assesses thelikelihood of conflict in relation to the changing level of ethnic fractionalization and ethnic polarization. Ethnicfractionalization measures the probability that two individuals drawn at random from a society will belong totwo different ethnic groups and thus increases with the number of ethnic groups present. Ethnic polarizationcaptures antagonism between individuals and is maximized when the society is divided into two equally sized anddistant ethnic groups. Refugee polarization is found to exacerbate the risk of conflict, with a one standarddeviation increase in the polarization index increasing the incidence of violent conflict by 5 percentage points. Suchan effect corresponds to a 10 percent increase at the mean. The opposite effect is found for the fractionalizationindex. Additional analyses are also conducted based on individual data. Ethnic polarization increases thelikelihood of experiencing physical assault by 2.1 percentage points. Inversely, the equivalent change in theethnic 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 refugeesper se impact the likelihood of violence. Indeed, there is no evidence of a significant correlation between the numberof refugees and the occurrence of conflict. Instead, the analysis points to the risk of conflict when refugeesexacerbate ethnic polarization in the hosting communities. In contrast, a situation where refugee flows increase thelevel of ethnic fractionalization is likely to see an attenuated risk of violence. This certainly calls forspecific interventions in polarized refugee-hosting communities.