RESEARCH

Working Papers

“Explaining Refugee Repatriation: The Role of the International Refugee Regime"

When the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) was created in the wake of WWII, it was mandated with the task of returning refugees to the country that they fled. Today, however, only one in every fifty refugees returns to their country of origin. Under what conditions do refugees repatriate? Existing explanations focus on conditions in origin and asylum countries, predominantly on the state of the conflict that refugees fled. However, this cannot explain cases whereby refugees do not return after a conflict ends or return while conflict is ongoing. In this book chapter, I argue that to explain whether refugees return, we must look more closely at the international refugee regime. A major factor affecting whether refugees return is the strategic interests of donor states, and their ability to influence UNHCR to implement or block repatriation programs. I examine the UNHCR’s main donor, the United States, and its ability to influence UNHCR through stipulating where its funding should be spent. First, I consider whether rates of return are higher when the government in the origin country receives external support from the US (1965-2023). I then conduct a historical analysis of repatriation during the Cold War, when there were clear political incentives to block repatriation to communist countries. Finally, I present data on the relationship between UNHCR funding and repatriation in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s, as well as rates of earmarked funding in 2023. I find support for the hypotheses that US foreign policy interests matter for repatriation and that there is a relationship between the funding received for repatriation and actual rates of repatriation. This evidence suggests that the UNHCR acts as an agent that is constrained by donor countries, motivating a deeper analysis of how the UNHCR operates, balancing its mandate to protect refugees with both the normative structure of the bureaucracy and the need for funding from donor countries.

“Support for Refugee Integration in a Major Refugee-Hosting Country: Evidence from Kenya,” with Adam Lichtenheld.

Throughout the world, states are becoming more progressive on refugee integration, providing refugees with greater rights to work, move, and build sustainable livelihoods. This is particularly striking in low- and middle-income countries, which host three-quarters of the world’s refugees. In this paper, we aim to understand the role of domestic factors in enabling this trend, exploring public opinion and support for refugee integration among host country citizens. We conduct a nationally representative phone survey in Kenya, the most recent prominent example of this trend. We leverage the unique time window between a new refugee law being passed and implemented to measure attitudes that are more behavioral than an abstract survey. We find strong support among the Kenyan population for hosting refugees and for the new refugee integration policy. In a survey experiment, we find that citizens support all dimensions of refugee integration, including work and movement rights, but are particularly supportive of sharing services with Kenyans. Ethnic kinship, along with expo- sure to and close contact with refugees, are most strongly associated with attitudes, with a smaller association for sociotropic concerns, and no significant association with economic vulnerability or previous experience of forced displacement. A second survey experiment shows that respondents are less supportive of refugees from Somalia, which we find is related to security concerns. As the first in-depth analysis of attitudes towards refugee integration prior to such a policy change, as well as the first rigorous survey of attitudes toward refugees in a country in sub-Saharan Africa, this paper contributes to our understanding of the domestic environment that can enable the adoption of integration policies that improve the lives of refugees.

“Understanding Intimate Partner Violence,” with Lisa Blaydes and James D. Fearon.

Violence against women occurs in societies across the world. The most common form of such violence is intimate partner violence (IPV), domestic abuse perpetrated against a spouse or intimate relationship partner. We present a household bargaining model that considers the factors that lead perpetrators to abuse as well as the conditions under which victims of abuse prefer to dissolve the household rather than remain in the abusive relationship. We relate key parameters from our model to factors that differ across societies and over time, including economic opportunities for women, laws to criminalize domestic abuse, and social norms associated with gender equality. We review research associated with these topics in order to establish what we know — and do not know — about the production of violence against women in households. While much of this literature appears outside of the field of political science, we highlight opportunities for political scientists to contribute to our understanding of how and why domestic violence persists in the world today.

Ongoing Projects

Re:Build: Refugee Economic and Social Integration in East Africa. RCT with International Rescue Committee (IRC), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), and Immigration Policy Lab (IPL).
Backlash to Refugee Integration? Evidence from Kenya. Panel survey.