Government Targeting of Refugees in the Midst of Epidemics

Alex Braithwaite, Michael Frith, Burcu Savun, Faten Ghosn

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

We investigate how the outbreak of epidemics can affect host governments' targeting of refugees and violation of their physical integrity rights. We argue that governments target repression against refugees for two reasons. First, refugees are easily scapegoated for the arrival of epidemics at a time when governments are looking to shift the blame for their own poor performance. Second, crises provide circumstances for governments to engage in opportunistic repression to further their goal of coercing existing refugees to depart and deterring new refugees from arriving. Drawing upon a global dataset of countries for the years 1996 to 2015, we demonstrate that epidemic outbreaks do indeed increase the likelihood and scale of government repression targeting refugee populations. These effects are especially pronounced in countries with higher proportions of refugees hosted and in less democratic countries. Identification of this potential for government repression of refugees during epidemics is important in light of the grave scale of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings suggest the international community should be vigilant for signs of governments' mistreatment of vulnerable refugee populations to shift focus away from their own poor handling of crises such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and opportunistically advance their goal of reducing the numbers of refugees hosted locally.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)490-506
Number of pages17
JournalPerspectives on Politics
Volume20
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 29 2022

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Political Science and International Relations

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Government Targeting of Refugees in the Midst of Epidemics'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this