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Measuring How Refugee Flows and Rights Shape Civil Conflict Binghamton University The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB) Graduate Dissertations and Theses Dissertations, Theses and Capstones 5-1-2018 Nowhere to Run: Measuring How Refugee Flows and Rights Shape Civil Conflict Katherine Emma Felt Binghamton University--SUNY, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://orb.binghamton.edu/dissertation_and_theses Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Felt, Katherine Emma, "Nowhere to Run: Measuring How Refugee Flows and Rights Shape Civil Conflict" (2018). Graduate Dissertations and Theses. 67. https://orb.binghamton.edu/dissertation_and_theses/67 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations, Theses and Capstones at The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB). It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB). For more information, please contact [email protected]. NOWHERE TO RUN: MEASURING HOW REFUGEE FLOWS AND RIGHTS SHAPE CIVIL CONFLICT BY KATHERINE EMMA FELT BA, Pennsylvania State University, 2010 MA, Binghamton University, 2014 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science in the Graduate School of Binghamton University State University of New York 2018 © Copyright by Katherine Emma Felt 2018 All Rights Reserved Accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science in the Graduate School of Binghamton University State University of New York 2018 May 1, 2018 David H. Clark, Chair and Faculty Advisor Department of Political Science, Binghamton University Benjamin O. Fordham, Member Department of Political Science, Binghamton University Seden Akcinaroglu, Member Department of Political Science, Binghamton University Stephen R. Ortiz, Outside Examiner Department of History, Binghamton University iii Dedication To my family, here and gone, who have valued education above all else. iv Acknowledgements This project and my time in the doctoral program have spanned the better part of a decade, which means there are likely more people to thank than I can reasonably hope to fit into this space. Nonetheless, I would like to extend my gratitude to the following people who have gone above and beyond to help me complete the dissertation. First and foremost, I must thank my advisor and chair, Dave Clark. From my first semester as a graduate student onwards, Dave has been a wonderful teacher, mentor, and friend. Whatever I understand about econometrics and statistics is mostly due to Dave’s instruction - as well as the office hours that often evolved into class sessions, complete with the full roster of students. To Dave: thank you for helping me learn how to reason through complex questions without letting pretension or jargon get in the way, and thank you for the many hours and many emails spent on moving this project from a vague idea in my first year to its current form as a finished dissertation. Second, I would like to thank my committee members Benjamin Fordham and Seden Akcinaroglu for their thoughtful and incisive comments and feedback on this project. I would also like to thank Stephen Ortiz, my outside examiner, for his feedback on the project and for suggesting pathways to enrich it. Additionally, I would like to thank Michael Weintraub, Amanda Licht, and David Cingranelli, whose expertise has been invaluable in moving through this project. Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to Katja Kleinberg and Wendy Martinek, who have helped to shape how I approach research and teaching, and who have also served as role models for the type of scholar and colleague I hope to be. v Working full-time while finishing a dissertation is not an easy undertaking, and would have been next to impossible without the support of my employers and coworkers. To that end, I would like to thank Greg Olsen, Danielle Ianni, and the rest of the staff of the University at Buffalo Enrollment Management Office for their support and flexibility while I finished this project. I was incredibly fortunate in the cohort of students with which I moved through the graduate program. I think it is a rare thing to find a group of people in graduate school who are so supportive, collaborative, and generally kind – in addition to being dedicated scholars whose insights enriched my own learning process. To Amuitz, Carlos, Graig, Scott, Sebastian, and Hyunjin: thank you for making graduate school not only bearable, but actually enjoyable. To Eric: thank you for being one of the reasons this was all worthwhile. There are many other graduate students in the program who have helped and supported me. Diana Branduse was my first friend and mentor, and her guidance helped me navigate my first years on the doctoral path. I would also like to thank Steve Chapman and Chrissy VanScoten for perspective as I entered the fishbowl of academia, and for Thursday nights spent cooking outside, drinking inside, and taking a much- needed break from working. Brendan Skip Mark has been a reliable friend and coauthor, and I would specifically like to thank him for his help in working through some of the theoretical and empirical pitfalls that arose towards the end of the dissertation process. Alena Gericke has been a constant support and a wonderful friend, inside and outside of the program, and I am quite certain that without her help I would never have crossed this finish line. vi Finally, I would like to thank my family. To my mother, Dana Felt, and my brother, Jesse Atkins: without your constant, unwavering, at times heroic support, I would never have made it to graduate school, let alone have finished a dissertation and a doctorate. Thank you for everything. vii Abstract In civil wars, innocent civilians live in the shadow of violence and destruction. This can range from low-level violence to aggressive campaigns of shelling of urban areas and massacres of entire villages in rural settings. In some cases, civilians respond to this violence by fleeing from the conflict to find refuge in neighboring states; however, in other civil wars, civilians remain trapped in the conflict zone, creating humanitarian disasters. This dissertation argues that civilians will flee when they have a reasonable, safe place to seek refuge, but in the absence of a safe place to seek sanctuary, civilians have no choice to but to stay put. When civilians can flee from violence, this vents the pressure from the conflict; however, if there is nowhere to run, civilians will not only remain in the conflict zone, but will feed back into the conflict processes. Civilians are a resource in civil wars that armed actors can leverage to extract resources, pull in humanitarian aid, coopt to join the conflict, and otherwise sustain the continuation of the fighting. If civilians are trapped and vulnerable in a conflict with high levels of violence and have no paths to flight, they become easy pickings for armed actors, which in turn fuels the conflict further; this creates what I call a pressure-cooker conflict state. To test this theory, this project introduces original data on how states treat refugees, and subsequently uses this data to create measures of the ability to flee—or “exit quality.” I conduct empirical analyses using these new measures and find that, if civilians are exposed to violence, civil wars that lack safe exit options tend to be bloodier conflicts that flare quickly but also burn out sooner. This project shows, then, not only that states surrounding civil wars can shape civilians’ choices to flee based on how they treat refugees, but that this also in turn shapes the development of civil wars. Shutting off viii opportunities for civilians to escape from conflict is problematic not only because it creates a humanitarian crisis, but also because it can change the course of the conflict. ix Table of Contents List of Tables......................................................................................................................xi List of Figures....................................................................................................................xii Chapter 1: The Theory of the Pressure Cooker Conflict State ........................................... 1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 Background on Refugee Flight Restrictions ................................................................... 4 Existing Models of Civilian Flight ................................................................................. 8 Theoretical Foundations: Exit Quality .......................................................................... 14 The Interaction of Exit Quality and Internal Violence ................................................. 19 Iraq: An Illustration of all Combinations of Exit Quality and Violence ....................... 22 Stasis: Low Violence Conflicts ..................................................................................... 24 The Syrian Civil War: Exodus ...................................................................................... 25 The Second Chechen Conflict: Illustrating the Pressure-Cooker ................................. 28 Additional Theoretical Concerns .................................................................................. 38 The Plan .......................................................................................................................
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