The Geography of Displacement, Refugees’ Camps and Social Conflicts

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, the authors analyze the geographical dimension ofrefugee camps in Africa by shedding light on the heterogeneous location patterns of hosting camps acrosscountries as well as the economic settings in which refugee camps are situated, which allows us to identify the maindeterminants of such patterns. Second, the authors investigate the effects of hosting refugees in camps on theoccurrence of protests and social conflicts, by using geo-referenced panel data from a large sample of Africancountries between 2000 and 2014. The main analysis is performed by using 50x50 km cells as units of analysis,GDELT and GED data on the frequency of protests, armed conflicts and other organized violence events and data fromUNHCR Camp Mapping Database. By using a counterfactual empirical strategy, the authors find that refugee campssignificantly increase the occurrence of protests only in the first two years while no significant effect is detectedin the subsequent years. The authors do not find evidence of any effect of camps location on the frequency of violenceevents resulting in casualties. Moreover, by performing ahighly detailed analysis with GHSL data the authors find that the presence of camps on average positively affectseconomic growth.