Displacement & Division: Refugee Return and Local Conflict After Civil War (Forthcoming, Cornell University Press)How does refugee return affect politics in refugees’ countries of origin? The number of refugees worldwide has nearly doubled in the past decade. Amid this rise in cross-border displacement, the international community touts refugee repatriation as both the preferred solution and endpoint to displacement crises. But conflict between returning and non-migrant populations is a nearly ubiquitous issue in post-conflict societies from Iraq to South Sudan to Guatemala. Why does refugee return so often lead to conflict? My book manuscript, Homeward Bound: Refugee Return and Local Conflict After Civil War offers a theory to explain this often-overlooked relationship between return migration and violence in post-civil war settings. I argue that refugee return creates new social divisions between those who fled and returned, and those who stayed. These cleavages become politically salient through interaction with local institutions, such as property rights, land rights, language laws, and citizenship regimes. I then use ethnographic evidence to trace the effects of return migration on post-civil war Burundi. Fieldwork for the project spanned thirteen months in South Sudan, Burundi, and Tanzania, during which time I conducted 258 semi-structured interviews in addition to participant and field observation. I find that refugee return from Tanzania to Burundi created new, violent, local-level conflict between ‘repatriates’ and ‘residents’. When Burundi faced a political crisis in 2015, these migration-related tensions shaped both the character and timing of renewed refugee flight. Homeward bound advances our understanding of identity and conflict and demonstrates why developing alternatives to mass repatriation is critical for both conflict prevention and ameliorating protracted forced migration.
