Civil War and Refugees in Post-Cold War Africa†

One inevitable by-product of large-scale civil conflict is the displacement of individuals, either voluntarily or by force. That fact has been a cornerstone of the international community's involvement in civil conflicts, which has increased markedly since the end of the Cold War. Yet few studies have investigated empirically the connection between such conflicts and the occurrence and extent of forced migrations, and none have evaluated whether the ongoing international response has been effective in breaking the link between civil war and forced migration. We thus begin with the goal of assessing whether and the extent to which the effect of civil wars on volumes of refugees has declined since the end of the Cold War, chiefly due to international efforts to mitigate the conditions that facilitate civil conflict or enhance its detrimental effects. We present a model of refugee flows that accounts for the influence of spatial, domestic, and international factors on those movements, and which allows for the possibility of both temporal variation in the influence of civil wars on those flows and prospective and retrospective temporal dependence in those flows. We go on to evaluate our expectations empirically, using data on refugee movements in Africa during the period from 1992 to 2000. Our findings suggest that the effect of civil wars on forced migration has been steadily declining during those years, a result consistent with the greater levels of international intervention in those conflicts during the period.