Doctoral Dissertation Research: Return Migration and Post-Conflict Governance

Violence wrought by civil war forces millions of people to flee their homes. While scholars have demonstrated how these population movements can spread and exacerbate conflict, return-migration is assumed to be a purely logistical issue. Once the war is over, people will simply return home and pick up where they left off. Yet, conflict between returning and non-migrant populations is a nearly ubiquitous issue for post-conflict societies from South Sudan to Iraq and Rwanda. Why does return-migration -- usually a sign of increased peace and stability -- so often lead to conflict? To understand this puzzle, the author develops a two part theory: first that migration during and after civil war creates social divisions based on where individuals were during the war, e.g. those that stayed, those who left and returned, and those who left and remain abroad. Second, these divisions become more or less invidious depending on how 'returnees' and 'stayees' interact with post-conflict governing institutions, such as property and land rights, language laws, and citizenship regimes.

To test this theory, the project uses political ethnographic methods, including semi-structured interviews, documents and archive analysis, in the primary case of Burundi. The author then uses comparative case studies to demonstrate how the theory works across civil war contexts. International intervention for post-conflict statebuilding has become an increasingly high-profile issue on the international scene. However, a lack of understanding about the changing sources of violence after war, for instance as a result of migration, has hindered the development of effective policy solutions. By providing an explanation for how an often-ignored but ubiquitous consequence of civil war -- the return of displaced populations -- affects post-conflict communities, this project will generate a more holistic account of the dynamics of violence after civil war and help advance both the study and the practice of post-conflict peacebuilding.