The Determinants of Environmental Migrants' Conflict Perception

Abstract

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.

Humanitarian need drives multilateral disaster aid

“…Since the 1970s, over 95% of deaths from climate- and weather-related disasters have occurred in developing countries ( 3 ). Particularly for developing countries, it is a concern that higher frequencies of natural hazards in a warming climate increase the risk of population displacement, social unrest, and conflict ( 4 , 5 ).…”

Understanding the Disaster–Migration–Violent Conflict Nexus in a Warming World: The Importance of International Policy Interventions

“…This is true both for the more conceptual level of differing assumptions about the consequences of disasters for individual and collective behavior and for the factors that shape such behavior. The same is true for the link between migration and violent conflict (Brzoska and Fröhlich 2016;Klepp 2017;Koubi et al 2018).…”

“…Another example of a study stressing international policy interventions is the study by Ghimire et al (2015), who emphasize the current importance of international humanitarian assistance in most disaster management situations but do not include it as a factor in their quantitative analysis. The importance of international policy interventions, in this case in the form of international protection of certain types of migrants, also is stressed in the work on their perceptions on armed conflict by Koubi et al (2018). It is also clearly visible in the recent research on environmental peacebuilding (Krampe 2017;Ide 2018).…”

“…The crucial factor shaping the importance of migration in the disaster-migration-violent conflict nexus seems to be the inter-group conflict in receiving regions (Klepp 2017;Koubi et al 2018). If migrants are predominantly from the same ethnic and social groups as those in the host community, migration will be less likely to instigate or increase violent conflict than in cases where host and migrant groups have been in conflict (Salehyan and Gleditsch 2006;Raleigh et al 2008;Barnett and Webber 2010).…”

The consequences of relocating in response to drought: human mobility and conflict in contemporary Kenya

“…Both domestically and across borders, permanent and temporary migration is a common climate change adaptation strategy [2][3][4][5][6][7] and while such mobility may have positive effects under certain circumstances [8], these moves can also lead to violent conflict [9][10][11][12][13][14]. Scholars have emphasized the value of investigating environmental migration at an individual-level [15,16], because doing so allows us to understand mobility related to employment opportunities [17], land use [18], and other outcomes. Nevertheless, associations between human mobility and climate change in relationship with violence and insecurity remain understudied.…”