International Factors in the Formation of Refugee Movements

Author(s): Aristide R. Zolberg, Astri Suhrke and Sergio Aguayo

Source: International Migration Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, Special Issue: Refugees: Issues and
Directions (Summer, 1986), pp. 151-169
Published by: The Center for Migration Studies of New York, Inc.
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International Factors in the

Formation of Movements
Refugee

Aristide R. Zolberg
Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research
Astri Suhrke
School of International Service, American University
Sergio Aguayo
El Colegio de Mexico

On the basis of detailed case studies by the authors of the principal re?
fugee flows generated in Asia, Africa, and Latin America from approx?
imately 1960 to the present, it was found that international factors often
intrude both directly and indirectly on the major types of social conflict
that trigger refugee flows, and tend to exacerbate their effects. Refugees
are also produced by conflicts that are manifestly international, but
which are themselves often related to internal social conflict among the
antagonists. Theoretical frameworks for the analysis of the causes of
refugee movements must therefore reflect the transnational character
of the processes involved. This paper sets forth such a framework and
points to the policy implications of the proposed reconceptualization.

REFUGEES IN TRANSNA TIONAL PERSPECTIVE1

The definition of refugees in general international law embodies an "in?

ternalist" vision whose validity is challenged by contemporary realities. The
usual criterion, ie., determination that the persons in question crossed an
international frontier as a consequence of a "well-founded fear of persecution",
implies that such fear is occasioned by an agent located within the country of
origin. This is confirmed by other considerations. Refugees within the
mandate of UNHCR also include persons outside their own country who can
be determined to be without, or unable to avail themselves of, the protection
of the government of their state of origin; but in such cases, as pointed out in
a recent authoritative work, it is essential that "the reasons for flight should
be traced to conflicts, or radical political, social, or economic changes in
their own country" (Goodwin-Gill, 1983:18).

1This article is based on research conducted

by the authors under a grant from the Ford and
Rockefeller Foundations. Detailed case studies that substantiate our argument will be published
in a forthcoming larger work. For an example of our approach, see, A. Suhrke and A. Zolberg,
"Social Conflict and Refugees in the Third World: The Cases of Ethiopia and Afghanistan"
IMR Volume xx, No. 2 151

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152 International Migration Review

The operative term here is "in their own country". From a legal perspective,
what matters is where the conflict itself takes place, with little concern for the
location of its causes; nevertheless, since international law is founded on the
of ? i.e., on the notion that the world is divided into a
concept sovereignty
finite set of states with mutually exclusive jurisdiction over segments of
and clusters of ? the definition in effect assumes that
territory population
the determinants of persecution are also internal to the appropriate state.
Against this, it is evident that factors originating outside the source country
of a given group of refugees commonly play an important role in triggering
the flow and in determining its course. This is manifestly the case in the
situations that together account for the majority of current, officially
recognized Third World refugees, including those encountered in the Horn
of Africa, Chad, Southern Africa, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia; and it is
applicable as well to most of the largely unrecognized claimants in and from
Central America.
Some of these realities have begun to be acknowledged at the level of
international law, as demonstrated by the Organization of African Unity's
1969 Convention on Refugee Problems in Africa, whose Article I begins with
a restatement of the established U.N. definition centered on persecution,
and then adds:

2. The term 'refugee' shall also apply to every person who, owing to
external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously
disturbing public order in either part or the whole of his country of
origin or nationality, is compelled to leave his place of habitual
residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside his country
of origin or nationality (Goodwin-Gill, 1983:281).

Although this article came into existence largely as an expression of political

solidarity on behalf of the then ongoing struggles against white rule in
southern Africa, it is generally relevant to our theoretical argument because,
by adding various types of foreign intervention and "events seriously
disturbing public order" to persecution as triggers, it points to the possibility
of formulating a general definition of refugees, anchored in a realistic
consideration of the processes that account for an already large and probably
growing share of people from the Third World who are outside of their
country and deprived of its protection.

(paper presented at the Center for Population Studies, Harvard University, 1984). We are
grateful to the Refugee Policy Group for providing an opportunity to present a preliminary
version of this paper to a critical audience at a workshop in Washington, D.C, in the spring of
1985, and to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions. This article was also
presented in different form at the World Congressof the International Political Science Association
in Paris, July 1985. Due to unforeseen circumstances and deadline pressures, final revisions were
made by A. Zolberg without consultation of the other co-authors.

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 International Factors in the Formation of Refugee Movements 153

In short, for purposes of social scientific analysis, refugees can be defined

as persons whose presence abroad is attributable to a well-founded fear of
violence, as might be established by impartial experts with appropriate
information. In cases of persecution covered by the classic definition, the
violence is initiated by some recognizable internal agent, such as the
government, and directed at a specified target group; the presence of members
of the group abroad may be the result of flight to avoid harm, or of expulsion,
itself a form of violence. But flight-inducing violence may also arise as an
incidental consequence of external or internal conflict, or some combination
of both, and affect groups that are not even parties to that conflict.2
Although only one of the triggers of violence mentioned is itself manifestly
international, factors external to the country from which the refugees originate
can contribute to both of the other two. And because the presence of such
factors constitutes the norm rather than the exception, it is appropriate to
think of refugee-formation as a transnational process.
Refugee movements thereby reflect a fundamental characteristic of the
contemporary world, namely its transformation into an interconnected whole
within which national societies have been profoundly internationalized.
Moreover, the effects under consideration do not constitute a collection of
random events but occur in the form of distinct patterns; and these can be
related in turn to the patterns of social conflict that foster refugee movements.
Today as in the past, these conflicts tend to arise in the course of two major
types of political transformations: abrupt changes of regime, particularly
social revolutions as well as the responses of incumbents to revolutionary
challenges, and the reorganization of political communities, particularly the
formation of new nation-states out of former colonial empires (Suhrke, 1983;
Zolberg, 1983a, 1983b).
Albeit usually considered as essentially "internal", these types of conflicts,
which trigger the classic situations of recognized refugees, often include an
element of foreign intervention. It is notorious that the various camps

2Whereas for legal and administrative

purposes it is usually necessary to establish dichotomous
categories (refugees and non-refugees), for the purposes of sociological analysis the concept of
refugee can be thought of as a variable on the basis of an index of danger, which might combine
the magnitude of the threat with the probability of its occurrence, as suggested by Patricia W.
Fagen in an oral comment on an earlier version of this paper. The set of people constituted on the
basis of this approach contains sub-categories involving different degrees of "refugeness"; it
includes people who are not currently recognized as refugees by relevant governments (e.g.,most
Salvadoreans in the United States), while excluding some who are {e.g., many Soviet Jews,
Cubans, and Vietnamese). It is hardly necessary to stress that we do not mean to suggest thereby
that people who do not appear in the set should be denied the right to leave their country, or not
be welcomed in the United States or elsewhere. It should be noted, incidentally, that the use of
violence as a definitional criterion makes it possible to distinguish refugees from persons who are
abroad as a consequence of natural disaster; victims of famine are refugees if the famine is itself
attributable to violence, as in the case of confiscatory economic measures (e.g., British land
policies in Ireland from the XVIIth century onward) or extremely unequal property systems
maintain by brutal force.

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154 International Migration Review

involved in revolutionary confrontation more often than not receive

significant support from abroad, ranging from encouragement to outright
armed intervention; in some cases, that support is determinative of the
outcome. Much the same can be said concerning nation-formation, which
often involves a clash between the state nationalism of a politically dominant
group vs. the nationalist aspirations of ethnic minorities; but the country's
neighbors usually have stakes in the conflict as well, since their own integrity
is likely to be affected by the outcome.
In addition to the manifest form of deliberate intervention by outsiders in
internal conflicts, external effects also occur more indirectly, in the form of
factors that exacerbate social and economic conditions, thereby rendering
the eruption of refugee-generating conflicts more likely. A variety of
"dependency" theorists have asserted that processes emanating from the
capitalist world economy constitute the root causes of both economic and
political underdevelopment; although the validity of such comprehensive
claims is questionable, there is little doubt that the world economy as presently
constituted is indeed a source of severe difficulties for latecomers.
The most problematic type of external effect consists of the policies of
potential receivers. The starting point here is that for a given flow of
refugees to come into being, certain conditions must be met in one or more
states of destination as well as in a state of origin. In the course of earlier
presentations, this assertion was deemed objectionable by some members of
the refugee policy community as it appears to suggest that those who aid
refugees are as much to blame as those who occasion the flows. But that is not
at all the point; upon reflection, the assertion can be seen as a trusim that
holds for all types of international migration. People cannot leave their
country if they have no place to go; and in effect, in a world of generally
restrictive controls on entry, the availability of such a place is largely
determined the of receivers ?
by governmental policy including potential
receivers, since the policy can be negative (Zolberg, 1981).
This does not mean that official authorities or others in the state of origin
deliberately take into consideration the availability of a place of refuge
before engaging in persecution and the like; but other things being equal,
the availability of a place of refuge may in some cases determine whether
persecution will lead to the formation of a refugee flow or to some other
outcome, such as mass murder, which can be thought of as a form of extreme
persecution that does not produce refugees.3

3The case referred to is of course that of the

European Jews during the Nazi era. There is little
doubt that the original objective of the Nazis with respect to Jews within Germany, and later
within the Europe they controlled, was expulsion; and the unwillingness of liberal democracies
to take in Jewish refugees is well documented also. What is less clear is the precise role which the
unavailability of an alternative place for the Jews played in fostering a shift of Nazi policy to the
"Final Solution" (Arendt, 1973; Wyman, 1984). Non-cases contribute to the understanding of
actual cases by highlighting elements of their configuration. For example, although the war in

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 International Factors in the Formation of Refugee Movements 155

The receivers can also make a positive contribution to the formation of

refugee flows, for example by admitting as refugees persons who would not
qualify under the prevailing U.N. definition;4 and such a generous policy
tends to act as a "pull" factor, leading some people to uproot themselves who
might not have done so otherwise. A similar effect might result from a
restrictive policy that is poorly enforced, or opposed by some significant
groups within the receiving country.5 It is therefore reasonable to suggest,
more generally, that the refugee policies of potential or actual receivers
function as an external factor influencing both the magnitude and the
direction of refugee movements.
Although refugee policy is shaped in part by domestic concerns, it lends
itself to many uses as an instrument of foreign policy, and therefore
considerations arising from this sphere are usually determinative. The
decision to bestow formal refugee status in accordance with the U.N.
Convention to citizens of a particular state usually implies condemnation of
the relevant government for persecuting its citizens, or at least failing to
afford them protection. A generous admission policy toward a certain group
enourages them to leave; not only can this be used propagandistically to
claim the people are "voting with their feet", but the outflow of certain
socioeconomic groups may also weaken the country of origin in a more
material sense. The traditional post-World War policy of the U.S. toward
citizens of communist countries, starting with Eastern Europe and China,
and then going on to Cuba and Indochina, was explicitly founded on such
considerations.6 Concomitantly, friends and allies can be helped through
burden-sharing of refugee inflows. Conversely, support for a government
normally implies denial of refugee status to its nationals, as illustrated by
U.S. behavior in the cases of post-Allende Chile, as well as El Salvador and
Guatemala today.

East Timor has caused very considerable destruction and suffering for almost a decade, it has
generated almost no refugees. This is because the conflict has received relatively little international
attention and the East Timorese resistance has not acquired foreign patrons, while the occupying
power, Indonesia, has powerful friends.
4The major illustration is U.S.
policy toward Communist countries in the post-World War II
period, initially with respect to Europe and later with respect to Cuba and Vietnam. Once again,
to avoid misunderstandings, we stress that this observation does not involve judgment on our
part.
5The current flow of Salvadoreans into the United States, as well as continued movements of
Indochinese peoples into SoutheastAsian countries whose governments had instituted a "humane
deterrence" against further entry illustrate how various combinations of these factorscan operate
to frustrate official policy.
6 A National Security Council document of 1953
put the case bluntly, stating that it is U.S.
policy to "encourage defection of all U.S.S.R. nationals as well as of 'key' personnel from the
satellite countries", justifying it on the grounds that defection "inflicts a psychological blow on
Communism", "counters Communist propaganda*in the Free World", and "though less im?
portant, the material loss to the Soviet bloc is also significant" (NSC, 1953).

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156 International Migration Review

The most extreme uses of refugee policy in the service of foreign policy
involve aiding exile communities that engage in military action against the
government of their country of origin. The classic case here is Arab support
for Palestinians, and the related decision not to integrate them in the receiving
countries since doing otherwise would serve to legitimize the existence of
Israel. Prominent recent instances include communities supported by the
United States or its allies: Afghans in Pakistan, Khmer on the Thai-
Kampuchea border, Nicaraguan contras on the border between Nicaragua
and Honduras. But the practice is by no means limited to one of the major
world camps, as indicated by Algerian support for Polisario guerillas claiming
the Western Sahara; use by Libya of northern Chadians in operations against
Chad; the complex interrelated cases involving Sudanese sanctuary for
anti-Ethiopian Eritreans (who receive military support from a variety of
Arab sources), and Ethiopian sanctuary for Sudanese secessionists; and the
grant of sanctuary by Iran to Afghan rebels.
The proposition that external factors play an important role in the
determination of contemporary refugee flows is thus well substantiated. But
although the above illustrations were drawn from the current or recent
scenes, it is evident that for each of the patterns indicated, one could also
muster a number of examples from the more remote past. In one sense, this
generally strengthens the point, as it can be seen to apply to the past as well as
to the present. But in another sense, the general observation thereby loses
some of its value in relation to the analysis of the present. It is therefore
necessary to specify further what is distinctive about the contemporary
situation. This requires a consideration of the global configuration that
generates the effects with which we are concerned.

GLOBAL STRUCTURES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES

The transnational perspective adopted here is grounded in the notion that

the globe constitutes a comprehensive field of social interaction, concept?
ualized as a network of interdependent political and economic structures,
but with some autonomy in relation to each other.7 What follows is of
necessity a broad summary account of those aspects of the global social field
that are especially relevant for the present purpose.
Although the origins of the contemporary world's political and economic
structures can be traced to the late Middle Ages (XVth-XVIth centuries), it
was only in the latter part of the XXth that they became truly global in scope.

7 It
might be noted that this conceptualization bears a family relationship to I. Wallerstein's
"world-system"(1974, 1979), but differs significantly from it, particularly in that we eschew the
functionalist notion of "system", and also recognize the existence of an international system of
states that generates distinctive politico-strategic processes with a dynamic of their own (Zolberg,
1981, 1983). Relevant works include Keohane and Nye (1972), Barraclough (1969), and Bull and
Watson (1984).

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 International Factors in the Formation of Refugee Movements 157

This resulted from a combination of distinct, albeit related, processes. First,

the breakup of the remaining traditional empires and of the more recent
colonial realms created in the process of European expansion resulted in the
emergence of a large number of new states, mainly in Asia and Africa. These
were integrated into an existing international system whose units consisted
of mutually exclusive nation-states exercising nominal equality at the level
of international law. Secondly, at about the same time, the last remaining
economically self-sufficient zones were incorporated into a global network of
trade and production organized along capitalist lines, and subject to all of
the processes engendered by these activities. This is true even of countries
whose states attempted to develop structurally distinct and autarchic economic
systems. Thirdly, partly as a consequence of the preceding, all parts of the
globe came to be linked into a single network of extremely rapid com?
munication, within which one can distinguish the emergence of elements of
a common culture ? the As a consequence of this, in?
"global village".
formation concerning events in one part of the world is readily transmitted
to other areas, and can play a role in events in those distant places as well.
Despite nominal equality among states at the level of international law
and talk of an "international community", the global network that came into
being is founded on enormous asymmetries of power and wealth, and exhibits
distinctively anomic features. In the political sphere, the absence of a central
mechanism of conflict-regulation allows competitive and conflictual forces
relatively free play. At the center, the balance of terror has fostered some
stability and restraint in the bilateral relations of the superpowers; and this
further governs relations within and between their respective European
alliances, encompassing the industrialized countries of the Pacific Basin
region as well.
But in sharp contrast with this, the periphery, which constitutes the largest
? both in terms of the number of states
segment of the global political system
involved and the share of population ? is
they contain subject to severe
instability and conflict. The expansion of the international politico-strategic
system to encompass the entire globe implies that even the poorest and
geopolitically least significant of states acquired some value as stakes in the
politico-strategic games of the major players. It follows that internal regime
changes among Third World countries tend to be perceived as having
implications for the wider system, and are therefore likely to provoke some
sort of response by outsiders. Intervention occasionally takes the brutal form
of military action ? direct or by way of substitutes ? but more
commonly
occurs in the less manifest form of pressure on political elites to maintain or
adopt a particular ideological orientation, often using economic and military
assistance as the carrot, and its withholding as the stick.
In many parts of Asia and Africa, the engagement by several neighboring
states simultaneously in the formation of national communities provides an

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158 International Migration Review

additional source of international tension because this sometimes involves

conflicting claims over the allegiance of certain ethnic groups and the
territory they inhabit. This process, which may be termed "competitive
state formation", provides the makings of the third of the patterns mentioned.
It is widely acknowledged that the difficulties inherent in the formation of
nation-states and the achievement of sustained economic growth are com?
pounded among contemporary Third World countries by such factors as
rapid demographic expansion, low resource endowment, undeveloped
human capital, extreme ethnic heterogeneity, and the like; but a variety of
"dependency" theorists have asserted further that the difficulties attributable
to internal givens are overshadowed by those emanating from the capitalist
world economy, and some have gone so far as to claim that processes
originating at that level constitute the root causes of both economic and
political underdevelopment. Although the comprehensive claims of de?
pendency theory are questionable, there is little doubt that most Third
World countries exhibit structural distortions that stem from their in?
corporation into the global economic system in the first instance as primary
producers, usually within the confines of a particular imperial or quasi-
imperial system of preference. With no choice but to participate in the global
economy on disadvantageous terms, they tend to experience effects such as
inflation, fluctuations in commodity markets, and unemployment in
amplified form, while reaping but a small share of benefits. This has the
effect not only of constraining these countries' choices of development
strategies but, by perpetuating and in some cases even worsening already
unfavorable conditions, of exacerbating the tensions and conflicts that are
inherent in major economic and political transformations.

REFUGEES AND SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS

Social revolutions involve a radical and rapid redistribution of economic,

social, and concomitant political power among social classes and groups
within largely agrarian societies marked by extreme structural inequality.
Although these conditions were historically commonplace in many parts of
the world, in the past social revolutions were relatively infrequent because
they require as well an initial weakening of the existing state by some
extraneous factors such as defeat in war (Paige, 1975; Skocpol, 1979). Within
most of the contemporary Third World, however, the state was not forged in
the course of a lengthy historical interaction with predatory neighbors, but
came into being by way of a process of decolonization, involving relatively
limited struggle, and hence is often weak to start with.
Extreme structural inequality prevails in most of Latin America and parts
of Asia, so that revolutionary challenges are likely to continue arising in
those regions in the foreseeable future. While most states of black Africa are
weak as well, they lack the social formation that is conducive to social

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 International Factors in the Formation of Refugee Movements 159

? i.e., a
revolution quite highly integrated society with a land-based class
system (Freund, 1984); upheavals are therefore more likely to take the form
of localized uprisings and perennial coups (Zolberg, 1967). Ethiopia is the
exception that confirms the rule, since its pre-revolutionary social organ?
ization was more like that of medieval Europe or many parts of Asia (Markakis
and Ayale, 1978).
All successful revolutions, as well as most attempted ones, have produced
major refugee movements. Historical cases include not only the French and
Soviet revolutions but also the American, whose numerous Tory refugees
went mostly to England and the western part of British North America (later
Ontario). In only one of these three cases was there a return movement, in
consequence of a successful counter-revolution. The Mexican Revolution of
1910 produced substantial population flows toward the United States, and in
1949 Chinese Kuo Min Tang supporters took over an entire island, which
had only recently been returned to China after half a century of Japanese
rule. Similarly, contemporary conflicts in Kampuchea, Vietnam, Ethiopia,
Iran, Afghanistan, Cuba, and Nicaragua, have accounted for a very large
part of the recognized international refugee population in recent years; and
the definition used here would produce a large pool as well, albeit somewhat
differently constituted.
This type of conflict almost always entails a significant element of foreign
involvement because of the linkages in the global state system between
regime orientation and international alignments. Established ruling classes
have external allies and supporters among the states arrayed in defense of
the status quo; conversely, revolutionaries tend to have links with those who
challenge the existing international order. In particular, revolutionary
conflicts attract the attention of the superpowers because ideological solidarity
is an instrument of international hegemony.
To state the obvious, U.S. governments tend to oppose revolutions while
Soviet governments tend to be favorably disposed toward them. In both
instances, intervention to defend an incumbent government against a
revolutionary challenge or to promote a revolutionary movement is more
likely if the country involved possesses some strategic significance; but it
should be noted that "strategic" is a highly flexible concept ? why, for
example, was Vietnam strategic from the point of view of the United States,
whereas Afghanistan is not?
Refugees are generated in the first instance by the generalized violence
and dislocation which typically accompany the onset of the revolutionary
process itself, regardless of its ultimate outcome. At a later stage, generalized
violence may recur if counter-revolutionary forces succeed in establishing
themselves in a position to challenge the consolidation of the revolution.
Second, the outcome itself will produce certain types of outflow. If the
revolution succeeds, it is likely to generate first a wave consisting of the old

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160 International Migration Review

ruling classes and their associates; and subsequently, people who are
negatively affected by the exigencies of revolutionary reconstruction. If the
revolution is contained or reversed, however, the resulting regime is likely
to take an authoritarian form and institute repressive measures against
partisans of the revolution. Related to this, refugee flows may be occasioned
by the repressive policies of authoritarian regimes that seek to prevent the
emergence of a revolutionary movement in the first place (e.g., Guatemala).
In cases of successful revolutions, the elite wave is likely to be numercially
small, often consisting of people who manage to bring out independent
means of support ? or have taken the precaution of amassing some savings
abroad against an eventuality such as they now face ? and always have at
least nominal foreign patrons. They easily qualify for refugee status under
the U.N. Protocol and experience little difficulty in finding countries of
asylum. However, the second outflow is more problematic. Although the
policies pursued by revolutionary regimes are in principle designed to effect
redistribution, the government is often led to impose great sacrifices on the
population in order to extract the resources needed for social investments;
this is exacerbated by the fact that such policies are generally carried out in a
hostile international economic environment. Under these circumstances, a
very large number of people may seek to leave, provided they have minimal
assurance of finding reasonable resettlement elsewhere; since it suits the
foreign policy of states that oppose the revolution to demonstrate it lacks
support, they are likely to provide the necessary havens, and refugee flows
will materialize accordingly. The cases of Vietnam and Cuba exemplify this
mechanism, although in both cases, post-revolutionary problems were
intensified by other factors as well.
A variation on the scenario occurs when the problems of revolutionary
reconstruction are compounded by the military operations of counter?
revolutionary forces. The resulting insecurity and added impositions by the
revolutionary regime, especially military mobilization, cause additional
people to leave; these flows are encouraged by the counterrevolutionaries
and their patrons because they provide a source of military manpower as
well. The Nicaraguan case provides a partial illustration of this dynamic;
although the formation of a second wave may have been hampered by the
reluctance of the United States to admit Nicaraguans as refugees ? following
negative domestic reactions to the massive admission of Cubans and Indo-
Chinese in 1980 ? there are signs that it is emerging as a consequence of the
Sandinista draft. The dynamic is relevant to Angola and Mozambique as
well, where counterrevolutionary forces have been supported by the Republic
of South Africa.
Direct military intervention by external actors, or substantial military
contributions from them, works in the same direction, but with much greater
intensity because they provide the antagonists with additional firepower,

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 International Factors in the Formation of Refugee Movements 161

and hence result in an enlargement of the fire zone, without fostering the
formation of a social base and legitimacy which are necessary to conclude a
conflict that concerns the very foundation on which society should be
constructed. Recent examples that have resulted in large refugee flows
include Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, Soviet and Cuban intervention
in Ethiopia (initially in relation to the Ethiopia-Somalian war, but subse?
quently in relation to internal conflicts within Ethiopia), and U.S. assistance
to the government of El Salvador.

REFUGEES AND THE REORGANIZATION

OF POLITICAL COMMUNITIES

The other major sources of contemporary refugee flows in the Third World
are the conflicts associated with the formation of new political communities
out of the dismantled European colonial empires, mostly in Asia and Africa.
By and large, the successor states have adopted the nation as their model of
political organization; but the achievement of the objectives this entails is
extremely difficult because the ethnic and cultural heterogeneity of the
countries in question vastly exceeds that of the countries of Western Europe
where the model originated (Emerson, 1960; Geertz, 1973; Young, 1980).
This is partly a consequence of ancient historical processes resulting in a
complex ethnographic configuration; but it is attributable in part also to
imperial policies that had the effect of compounding differences between
ethnic and racial groups by endowing them with a dimension of social and
economic inequality (Zolberg, 1973; Hechter, 1975).
Nation-formation entails efforts to develop a common culture within a
country by reducing existing diversity. In relation to this broad objective,
the most relevant cultural elements are religion and language; but the
emphasis may extend to other forms as well, including ethnicity and "race"
(as defined within the relevant culture). In the classic Western European
cases, the process involved attempts by a politically dominant group which
defined its own culture as the "national" one to secure conformity to it by
others. In the face of non-compliance, authorities imposed conformity by
violent means, causing target groups to flee or to be expelled. The history of
state-formation in early modern Europe is punctuated by perennial flows of
?
religious refugees Jews and Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula (XVth,
XVIth, and XVIIth Centuries); Protestants from the southern Low Countries
(XVIth-XVIIth); Catholics, especially Irish, from the United Kingdom
(XVth-XVIIth); Protestants again from France before and after the Revocation
of the Edict of Nantes (1685), an event whose tricentenary was appropriately
commemorated by the refugee community last year (UNHCR, 1985). These
ground to a halt only in the XVIIIth century, after many of the minorities
had been eliminated (including by way of conversion) or silenced, and states
had begun to discover the material as well as moral benefits of tolerance.

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162 International Migration Review

The contemporary situation of Third World countries was prefigured in

Eastern Europe and Western Asia following the dismantlement of the
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires after World War I, when adoption
of the national model by highly heterogeneous successor states generated
enormous tensions, out of which emerged the minorities and the stateless,
"two victim groups... whose sufferings were different from those of all others
in the era between the wars", in that they "lost those rights which had been
thought of and even defined as inalienable, namely the Rights of Man"
(Arendt, 1973:268). As noted, the dismantlement was itself in part a con?
sequence of participation by those empires in a large-scale war; moreover,
throughout the area, tensions within each of the successor states were
compounded by further international conflicts, themselves fueled in part by
competing claims for the allegiance of national groups and their territorial
home, as well as by the ill treatment that neighboring states meted out to
what was a minority in one place, but the dominant nationality in the other.
The persecution of certain minorities on the ground that they constituted an
obstacle to the achievement of national unity even became a key mechanism
in the formation of a new type of regime among older nations that were not
significantly multiethnic (Arendt, 1973; Zolberg, 1983). These processes
produced new refugee flows from Europe and, when most of the states of
potential refuge barred entry to those persecuted, the Final Solution
(Marrus, 1985). It was largely out of this experience that the concept of
"refugees" entered into international law.
In Asia and Africa today, the intrinsic difficulties of nation-building are
compounded by underdevelopment; but this condition is itself deemed to
make consolidation of the nation-state especially urgent because rulers tend
to believe that only a strong state, founded on the sort of loyalty that national
solidarity fosters, can afford them the leverage necessary to pursue de?
velopmental objectives. It is noteworthy that these tendencies are independent
of the ideological orientation of the state in question. Since a given country's
ethnic groups always share unevenly in political and economic power to start
with ? for example, at the time of independence, for reasons indicated at the
beginning of this section ? nearly every type of social conflict between the
powerful and the weak, the haves and the have-nots, tends to manifest itself
also as a confrontation between ethnic groups.
In consequence, ethnic conflicts of all sorts are endemic throughout
contemporary Asia and Africa. Although they nearly always involve some
degree of violence, this is likely to be particularly high where ethnic (including
religious, racial, linguistic) differences clearly coincide with class lines.
Many former European colonies retain elements of this because they were
formed into "plural societies" by way of the establishment of a highly unequal
economic division of labor between specific groups of natives and immigrants
(Furmivall, 1948); elsewhere, such situations are attributable to a history of

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 International Factors in the Formation of Refugee Movements 163

by other non-Europeans. The advent of independence provides an op?

portunity for drastic action against privileged minorities, occasionally
producing large refugee movements. Leaving aside the departure of Euro?
peans, who as nationals or now "patrials" of the former imperial power
usually do not appear in the ranks of refugees, this can occur in a variety of
forms; by way of deliberate expulsion, as in the case of Ugandan Asians, or
attempted genocide with a massive exodus of survivors, as in Rwanda and
Burundi.
It is noteworthy, however, that most of the innumerable ethnic conflicts
involving violence in the regions under consideration do not produce refugee
flows. As in the case of revolutionary upheavals, the formation of refugee
flows is much more likely when the process of constituting a political
community is somehow internationalized. A prima facie case for this
proposition emerges from a consideration of two divergent patterns in the
Indian subcontinent: recurring ethnic conflict within India typically does
not produce refugees, but ethnic conflict within Pakistan, involving the
establishment of Bangladesh, produced millions of refugees within a few
months.
One distinctive pattern may be termed competitive nation-formation.
This occurs when the national model adopted is such that the objectives it
entails cannot be achieved except by violating the integrity of another state.
A first instance of competitive nation-formation is separatism, when an
ethnic minority ? usually concentrated within a particular territorial space
? which has been unable to secure
acceptable conditions within the state as
constituted seeks to establish a state of its own in defiance of the larger entity.
A second is irredentism, when a state seeks to incorporate under its jurisdiction
an ethnically cognate group that is presently under the jurisdiction of
another state; this usually involves conflict between the two states over the
territory inhabited by the group in question. The two processes sometimes
occur in complementary fashion within a given situation (e.g., Ogadeni
separatism within Ethiopia, and Somalian irredentism in relation to the
Ogaden).
However, changes of boundaries usually have more limited implications
for the distribution of power and values in the international system than
changes of regime* The internationalization of such conflicts is therefore
much more circumstantial, depending upon the location of the state or states
involved in relation to prevailing international alignments. Occasionally,
the large powers may become involved, as in the Horn of Africa; but more
typically, the issues are of concern primarily to regional actors. For example,
the conflict leading to the establishment of Bangladesh attracted only
superficial large-power attention, although it meant the breakup of an
existing country which was allied to the United States at the time; there was
also limited interest in the Biafran secession form Nigeria.

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164 International Migration Review

Although conflict between governments and ethnic or religious minorities

is endemic throughout Asia and Africa, separatists are seldom successful.
Their victory appears to be conditional upon external support (Horowitz,
1981). At the very least, they will try to balance the inherent advantages of
the government forces which, by their very position, enjoy a measure of
external support in the form of diplomatic recognition, financial and legal
facilities for the acquisition of weapons, and the like (Modelski, 1964). But
whereas the diversity and competitive logic of the contemporary international
system make it possible for most movements to find an external patron of
some sort, the conservative nature of the system tends to limit that support to
a level short of what is required for success. As indicated, extra-regional
powers seldom have sufficient interest in the matter to warrant intervention;
and Third World neighbors usually hesitate to do so because of their residual
commitment to the maintenance of the boundaries they inherited, particularly
in Africa. A case in point is the adamant stance of the Organization of African
Unity on the issue of Eritrea. The major exception is Bangladesh, the only
case of successful separatism in the post-World War II period, attributable in
large part to India's intervention. Although that conflict generated a very
large flow of refugees, its outcome also provided a homeland to which the
refugees by and large returned within a short time.
The Bangladesh case suggests, more generally, that successful separatism
might be associated with a distinctive pattern of short-lived refugee move?
ment. However, unsuccessful separatist challenges also tend to produce
refugees, but of a more problematic kind. Despite their lack of success,
movements of this sort can persist for a long time because the state that is
challenged seldom possesses the resources required for effective repression
and containment, while the separatists ? by definition ? benefit from some

degree of popular support and have the advantage of operating on their own
terrain; as noted, they usually also manage to secure at least limited aid from
some patron. International assistance to the antagonistic camps has the effect
of enhancing their respective capacity, and hence to widen the firezone as
well as to prolong the conflict.
Separatism initially produces a small wave of political exiles, who have
little difficulty finding havens. If and when the struggle moves into a
military phase, a second and much larger wave emerges as entire populations
try to flee the fire zone and systematized repression. States facing separatist
guerillas typically exercise violence against the source group as a whole, any
member of which is considered an actual or potential supporter of insurgency.
Since we are speaking of a separatist movement which, by its very nature, is
likely to occur on the geographical periphery, near a state's international
borders, many in the target group usually succeed in getting out.
The UNHCR's expanded interpretation of its mandated role has helped
to reduce recognition problems refugees fleeing from the violence generated

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 International Factors in the Formation of Refugee Movements 165

by competitive state-formation and separatist conflict, as has the Organization

of African Unity's broad definition of refugees cited at the beginning of this
article. However, to the extent that neighboring states are opportunistically
involved in the conflict and face severe economic and political problems of
their own, the refugees find protection and support uncertain.
The impact of international factors is dramatically manifested in the case
of the Eritreans, whose protracted attempt to gain independence from
Ethiopia, compounded by occasional outbursts of internecine strife between
Christians and Muslims, has been going on for over twenty years, surviving
a revolutionary change in Ethiopia, which has given rise to refugee move?
ments of its own. The lasting power of the uprising and its many successes are
attributable not only to widespread opposition to annexation by Ethiopia,
but to external assistance from a broad array of Arab states ? whose conflicts
have contributed to the internal strife mentioned ?
including especially
Sudan, which has provided the rebels with adjoining external bases from
which to conduct operations. Until 1974, the Ethiopian imperial regime
contained the uprising with assistance from the United States and Israel; but
the protracted conflict contributed to its collapse in 1974 and the onset of
revolution. Taking advantage of these developments, four years later the
separatists were on the verge of success. However, massive intervention by
the Soviet Union and Cuba enabled Ethiopia's revolutionary government to
hang on to the major Eritrean cities, and then use them as bases for terror-
bombing the separatist-minded rural areas. The ups and downs of the
conflict over the last decade have generated several waves of refugees, whose
location in adjacent border regions within Sudan provides a manpower pool
for Eritrean military organizations.

REFUGEE-WARRIOR COMMUNITIES

Under appropriate circumstances, the internationalization of either of the

major types of social conflict considered can bring about a similar outcome,
the formation of a refugee-warrior community. This is well illustrated by the
otherwise disparate cases of Ethiopia and Afghanistan. The initial population
? Eritreans to the Sudan and ? involves
movement Afghans to Pakistan
whole societal segments, in which the men engaged in war are accompanied
by their dependents (and often animal flocks as well). In exile, however, they
usually lack the means for even subsistence production. Hence they are
heavily dependent on international or local assistance to stay alive. On
these grounds, they lay claim to and usually receive substantial human?
itarian relief. But communities of this type cannot persist for long unless
they secure substantial external partisan political support, because the
"warriors" are engaged in military operations across the border, and hence
associate their hosts in an act of war. Moreover, such communities frequently
receive material and diplomatic assistance from external patrons in re-

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166 International Migration Review

cognition of their use as foreign policy instruments in related international

rivalries.
Once established, refugee-warrior communities tend to grow because they
provide opportunities and even incentives for others to become politically
active. Individuals in exile may find that the most socially meaningful and
economically rewarding activity is to join the warriors, and consequently
move from the category of mere displaced persons into that of the politically
active and conscious. These communities also seem to have radicalizing and
self-perpetuating dimensions. The refugee situation is one in which tra?
ditional leadership structures have been weakened, because their material
underpinnings have been removed; but it also offers a new set of resources in
a new situation which can be used by innovative political entrepreneurs to
establish themselves.
The contemporary archetype of the refugee-warrior community is con?
stituted by the Palestinians. While there are some important differences
between that case and the others mentioned, the more important point is that
each of them can be considered as a variant manifestation of a common type,
which might also include the Khmer on the Thai-Kampuchean border,
Nicaraguan "contras" operating out of Honduras and Costa Rica, and the
Western Saharan's POLISARIO with bases in Algeria and Mauritania. The
appearance of this phenomenon in many different parts of the Third World
suggests that refugee-warriors are perhaps the characteristic phenomenon of
our times.
Here as well as in the other situations considered, marginal economic
conditions tend to exacerbate the destructive impact of civil strife, and hence
have a multiplier effect on refugee flows. Concomitantly, continuous conflict
causes life-threatening economic dislocations in areas where the population
is already living close to subsistence level. As violence becomes a major
means of survival, it tends to feed on itself; this process may foster the
proliferation of armed factions, leading to the emergence of a warlord
system, as seems to have already occurred in Chad, and is perhaps under way
in Uganda as well.

CONCLUSIONS: POLICY IMPLICATIONS

The policy implications which flow from this analysis do not pertain to
immediate, operational questions of material assistance or asylum; rather,
they concern broader policy directions of relevance to all groups and agents,
public and private, that deal with refugees.
As other contributors to the "root-cause" debate correctly stress, to aid
those who at any given time happen to be refugees is a necessary but
insufficient response; to establish a basis for genuinely remedial policies, we
must achieve a better understanding of the reasons for the existence of
refugees (Sadruddin Aga Khan, 1981; Keely, 1981).

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 International Factors in the Formation of Refugee Movements 167

Refugees will continue to appear in the Third World because most of the
countries involved are in the throes of great social and political trans?
formations that unavoidably entail types of social conflicts that generate
violence, including classic persecution, and which people seek to escape by
fleeing, sometimes abroad. In this article, we have demonstrated that the
dynamics leading to the inception of these social conflicts are not purely
internal but transnational, and that as the conflicts develop they tend to be
further internationalized. This is the result of epochal trends that have
fostered a very general globalization of society and domestic politics.
The most extreme manifestation of this blurring of the boundaries between
what is internal and what is external to a given country is direct foreign
intervention, either in the form of troops, or of critical military and economic
assistance to one of the protagonists in a local confrontation. In the context of
a revolutionary conflict, either form of intervention tends to prolong and
exacerbate the conflict in such a way as to produce protracted and difficult
refugee situations. Less obvious, indirect forms of intervention (such as
economic and diplomatic embargos) have similar effects.8 In the context of
competitive nation-state formation, foreign intervention tends to have an
opportunistic character which also contributes to the making of severe,
festering refugee problems.
The countries presently engaged in such activities include the U.S, the
U.S.S.R., Vietnam, the Republic of South Africa, Libya, France, Cuba,
Israel, China, and Indonesia. As the list indicates, active interventionists
include both superpowers and smaller states, and states with a variety of
regime orientations. This would suggest that intervention is a general
structural propensity of the contemporary international system. But,
paradoxically, this also makes it possible to consider ways of changing the
situation. In this regard, we suggest the following guidelines for further
consideration.
1) The idea of solving the "global refugee crisis" by stepping up develop?
ment assistance to modify socioeconomic conditions in the countries of
origin is clearly insufficient. To the extent that the causes are international,
the solutions too require actions at the international level; in particular,
since refugee-producing situations are related to foreign intervention,
solutions require concerted diplomatic action.
2) From the specific perspective of the United States, this implies in the
first instance the necessity of modifying ongoing foreign policy. Americans
with a deep humanitarian concern for the plight of refugees must acknowledge
the necessity for action in this sphere, not as an afterthought but as a central
concern.

8 The current argument that sees U.S. intervention in Central.America as a means to

prevent
future flows of "feet people" posits a complete inversion of this historical dynamic. A recent
succinct discussion of this can be found in Gomez (1984).

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168 International Migration Review

3) The general direction of policy modification must be towards reduced

intervention. As in the case of arms control, which is a useful analogy,
reduced intervention can be achieved by various procedures. Unilateral
restraint is appropriate at certain times; other situations call for negotiations
to promote mutual regulation. Although the vision of an end to all inter?
vention is Utopian, and perhaps even morally dubious, this does not mean
that it is impossible to make progress toward restraining intervention so as to
alleviate human suffering.9
4) It must be recognized that refugee policy cannot be "humanitarian" in
the sense of completely apolitical. decision as to whether or not to
The
support various groups as "refugees" always implies to some degree a foreign
policy decision. Conscious deception of others, or unconscious deception of
self, can be reduced by seeking to make the recognition explicit. This applies
to government agencies as well as voluntary agencies and public interest
groups.
9 A legal and moral argument can be made for intervention in certain cases, notably those
involving massive and gross violations of human rights. Stanley Hoffman (1981)presents a recent
liberal formulation of this view.

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