The Globalization of Social Conflicts and the Growth of the World Refugee Problem

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Since the late 1940s, the violent upheavals in the developing world have generated a flood of political refugees variously estimated as between 40 and 75 million people. While politically induced migrations have occurred throughout human history, the number of political refugees appears to have reached an historical peak. This flow of refugees has important legal dimensions as this migration seems rooted in the increasing interdependence of the world and the globalization of social and ethnic conflicts. Dr. Jenkins seeks to address this issue through studying refugee flows across a wide sample of national boundaries between 1955 and 1990. The core of this work is a cross-national quantitative analysis of the social and political sources of the world-wide explosion in the number of political refugees. Drawing on time series and lagged-panel regression, the analysis will investigate various hypotheses pertaining to the globalization of social conflicts that have been advanced to account for the growth and intensity of the refugee problem. By constructing an annualized account of the initiation, intensity, and duration of refugee flows, the research will be able to illuminate the sources of civil instability and the effects of instability, wars, famines, and facilitative conditions on refugee migrations. This study will substantially advance our understanding of the causes of refugee migration over the past several decades. The effort to construct and evaluate annual data on refugee migration and populations for 152 countries for 35 years will be a valuable scientific contribution in and of itself as is the development of this data resource. As important, however, is the relationship of this project to recent theoretical developments. In recent years, theoretical attention has focused on refugee producing situations and away from conceptualizing refugee migrations as idiosyncratic. This work constitutes the first major test of such theoretical ideas.