Social Cohesion and Refugee-Host Interactions: Evidence from East Africa

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Refugees, Diversity and Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa

“…In our context, where refugees are likely to be accompanied by contestable public resources, intergroup contact with many small groups (high fractionalization) is likely to reduce the risk of conflict. We should stress that our results do not contradict other relevant papers commissioned by the World Bank (Betts et al, 2021;Pham et al, 2021;Coniglio and Vurchio, 2021). According to our results, refugees per se do not affect directly the likelihood of conflict, but it is the way they alter ethnic diversity in refugee-hosting areas that matters.…”

“…Closer to our context, Betts et al (2021), , Sedova et al (2021) and Pham et al (2021) study the impact of displacement on conflict and social cohesion in Uganda, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Betts et al (2021) find that in Uganda, the intensity of refugee interactions with hosts does not strongly affect their perceptions of refugees. A similar finding is reported by Zhou and Lyall (2021) in Afghanistan.…”

Attitudes and Policies toward Refugees: Evidence from Low- and Middle-Income Countries

“…They find that unlike in the Global North, forced displacement policies in the Global South have become more liberal over time. Betts et al (2021) explores the role of inter-group interaction in shaping social cohesion between refugees and host communities in East Africa. The authors find mixed results: host community attitudes towards refugees (and vice versa) are likely to be shaped by a combination of intra-group attitude formation at the neighbourhood level, and inter-group interaction, with different mechanisms of interaction likely to be more salient for attitude formation in particular contexts (e.g.…”

Environmental Resource Scarcity and Peaceful Co-existence between Refugees and Host Communities in Uganda

“…ref years is the duration in years of the head of household i's stay in Uganda. We include this variable since longer stay durations may directly affect trust in host populations by virtue of more chances to interact (Betts et al, 2022). X ij is a vector of household i's characteristics, such as household size and number of children, and the 11 The distance to firewood collection points variable in Table 1 takes 0 if the refugee respondent does not use firewood for cooking fuel.…”

“…Our empirical evidence offers meaningful lessons not only for the future of the Uganda Model but also for other refugee-receiving nations that follow global shifts in support policies in their pursuit of local integration amidst refugee crises. Betts et al (2022) is a complementary study that tests intergroup contact theory to explore the determinants of social cohesion from both host and refugee perspectives using survey data from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. The current study is meaningfully distinct.…”