Anti-refugee Violence and Intercommunal Integration: The Role of State Response

• In Event: Historical and Contemporary Challenges to Host-Refugee Integration

Abstract

Although anti-refugee violence is a grave threat to refugees’ well-being, the absence of fine-grained data has limited scholars’ ability to study the timing and consequences of such violence. We address this gap using two new datasets from Turkey, the country with the largest refugee population in the world. First, we employ anonymised call-level phone data from Turkey to calculate refugee-native contact and spatial segregation at a district-day level. Next, we combine these measures with a hand-coded dataset of anti-refugee riots that includes information on the state response to riots. We use difference-in-difference methodology to answer three questions: One, does violence affect intercommunal relations even in places where the violence did not occur? Two, do intercommunal relations recover to their pre-violence levels over time? Three, does the state response to anti-refugee violence mitigate the negative effects on refugee-host community integration? Our findings will help policymakers and scholars understand and counteract anti-refugee violence more effectively.

Authors

• Kerim Can Kavakli, Bocconi University

• Tugba Bozcaga, King's College London

• Giovanna Marcolongo, Bocconi University