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

自20世纪40年代末以来，发展中国家的暴力动荡造成了大量政治难民，估计人数在4000万至7500万之间。虽然人类历史上因政治原因引起的移徙时有发生，但政治难民的人数似乎已达到历史高峰。这种难民流动具有重要的法律层面，因为这种移徙似乎植根于世界日益相互依存以及社会和种族冲突的全球化。詹金斯博士试图通过研究1955年至1990年间跨越国家边界的大量难民流动来解决这个问题。这项工作的核心是对世界范围内政治难民数量激增的社会和政治根源进行跨国定量分析。利用时间序列和滞后面板回归，分析将调查与社会冲突全球化有关的各种假设，这些假设是为了解释难民问题的增长和强度而提出的。通过建立一个关于难民流动的开始、强度和持续时间的年度账户，该研究将能够阐明国内不稳定的根源以及不稳定、战争、饥荒和便利条件对难民移民的影响。这项研究将大大促进我们对过去几十年难民移民原因的理解。构建和评价152个国家35年来关于难民移徙和人口的年度数据的努力本身就是一项宝贵的科学贡献，这一数据资源的发展也是一项宝贵的科学贡献。然而，同样重要的是，这个项目与最近理论发展的关系。近年来，理论上的注意力集中在产生难民的情况上，而不是将难民移徙概念化为特殊现象。这项工作是对这些理论思想的第一次重大检验。

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.