Displacement of civilians has long been understood as a predictable and devastating effect of conflict. When violence makes it unsafe for people to stay in their homes, many choose to leave and seek a new home, either temporarily or permanently. In recent years, however, much of the security discourse around refugees and conflict has supposed that refugees are as much a cause of conflict as an effect, often with little direct evidence.  The next two Deep Dives will look at what we actually know about how conflict-driven migration affects security challenges in areas where refugees settle.

This week we’ll look at Midnight Oil alumna Stephanie Schwartz’s new article in International Security, covering what happens when refugees displaced by civil conflict return home after the conflict to a changed, and charged, political environment. 

As Schwartz notes, the return of refugees to their home communities is often seen as a kind of capstone for a peace process. If people who have been displaced can go back to where they used to live, the thinking goes, then that repatriation might serve to undo the harm caused by their displacement. Lives will return to normal, and returnees will reintegrate back into the communities they left behind.

The problem with that thinking is that no amount of repatriation can turn back time. The communities to which refugees return have been changed by conflict and a peace deal is no guarantee that the tensions of the conflict have dissipated. What’s more, migration has changed returnees as well. Their experiences of the conflict are radically different from those of the people who stayed behind, and the traumas and opportunities created by each set of experiences can create distinct identities based on migration decisions: those who left and those who remained.

To better understand how those divergent identities shape the contentious politics of ostensibly post-conflict societies, Schwartz conducted ethnographic research within Burundian communities following the country’s civil war. She found that migration-based identities — rapatriés and résidents — were highly relevant in post-war Burundi, and that government policies only heightened the tension between the two. Migration during the war and as a result of earlier conflicts had created de facto land reforms, with résidents taking over some of the land rapatriés left behind. When the rapatriés returned, land disputes followed. After the war, the Burundian government created a commission that eventually set to work systematically resolving land disputes in favor of the rapatriés, giving added shape to the grievances of the résidents. 

Eventually, growing grievances on both sides exploded into further conflict. In 2015, a decade after the end of the civil war, an election crisis forced many to leave Burundi to avoid violence. The main predictor of who fled in the 2015 crisis was not who opposed the governing party but rather who had fled before and was now engaged in a land dispute over land they left behind and had tried to reclaim. Past migration status, an identity that was an artifact of previous conflicts with different cleavages, became itself a main cleavage in the 2015 crisis. This example, Schwartz argued, means that policymakers must make post-conflict decisions with an eye not just to the tensions that preceded the conflict but also to the tensions that the conflict itself created, including disputes caused by refugee returns.

Randy Thompson drew a line between the Trump administration’s reversal of course on pursuing a ceasefire in northern Syria and the president’s need to maintain support from his political base among white, evangelical Christians. Initially, President Trump’s decision to pull American troops from Syria without any agreement between the remaining forces left Kurdish militias there largely at the mercy of the Turkish military. White evangelicals, who see Kurdish militias as being particularly tolerant of Christian minorities in the region, quickly pushed back, leading to the policy change.

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