Migration is likely to be a key factor linking climate change and conflict. However, our understanding of the factors behind and consequences of migration is surprisingly limited. We take this shortcoming as a motivation for our research and study the relationship between environmental migration and conflict at the micro level. In particular, we focus on environmental migrants' conflict perceptions to shed new theoretical and empirical light on this debate. We contend that variation in migrants' conflict perception can be explained by the type of environmental event people experienced in their former home, i.e., gradual, long-term or sudden onset, short-term environmental changes. We examine and further develop this argument before quantitatively analyzing newly collected micro-level data on intra-state migration from five developing countries. The results emphasize that migrants who suffered from gradual, long-term environmental events in their former homes are more likely to perceive conflict in their new location than those having experienced sudden, short-term environmental events. These findings are therefore in line with our theoretical argument that environmental migrants who suffer to a large degree from environmentally induced grievances, are ultimately more likely to perceive conflict and challenges in their new homes.

No abstract