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Refugee Flows, Ethnic Power Relations,and the Spread of ConflictDaniel Krcmaric aa Department of Political Science , Duke UniversityPublished online: 25 Feb 2014.

To cite this article: Daniel Krcmaric (2014) Refugee Flows, Ethnic Power Relations, and the Spread ofConflict, Security Studies, 23:1, 182-216, DOI: 10.1080/09636412.2014.874201

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Security Studies, 23:182–216, 2014Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0963-6412 print / 1556-1852 onlineDOI: 10.1080/09636412.2014.874201

Refugee Flows, Ethnic Power Relations,and the Spread of Conflict

DANIEL KRCMARIC

Why do some refugee flows cause conflict in the host state andothers do not? Drawing on bargaining models of war, I arguerefugees are especially likely to cause conflict when they alter thehost state’s ethnic balance of power. More specifically, I explainwhy multiple informational and commitment problems arise whenrefugee flows produce a rapid shift in relative power between ethnicgroups. As an empirical strategy, I examine a unique controlledcomparison made possible by the influx of Kosovar refugees intoAlbania and Macedonia in 1999 that eliminates over a dozencompeting explanations for civil conflict. I then use process tracingto demonstrate how a change in relative power between ethnicgroups fostered violence in Macedonia, whereas the preservation ofthe ethnic balance facilitated a peaceful refugee flow into Albania.This evidence, though tentative, indicates that a refugee flow’s effecton the host state’s ethnic balance of power can help explain whetherthe state experiences peace or conflict.

Recent research and contemporary events suggest that refugee flows areoften responsible for the spread of conflict across international borders. Inacademia, statistical analyses find a significant correlation between a state’srefugee population and the onset of civil war.1 Detailed studies of a few high-profile cases also show that refugees can contribute to domestic unrest in ahost country.2 In the policy realm, many fear that refugees impose negativeexternalities on host nations that may cause violence to spread from state to

Daniel Krcmaric is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at DukeUniversity and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.

1 Idean Salehyan and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, “Refugees and the Spread of Civil War,” InternationalOrganization 60, no. 2 (April 2006): 335-66.

2 Gerard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Conti-nental Catastrophe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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state. For example, United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 created asafe zone in northern Iraq in 1991 partially to prevent refugees from entering,and possibly destabilizing, neighboring Turkey. Looking forward, the securitychallenges associated with refugee flows will remain a policy priority: thereare over fifteen million refugees worldwide and another twenty-seven millioninternally displaced persons that might soon become refugees.3

Although scholars have made a good deal of progress in demonstratingthat refugees can facilitate security problems in host states, much less isknown about the conditions under which refugee flows cause conflict tospread. This gap in the literature is particularly striking when one considersthat the majority of refugee flows are nonviolent.4 This presents a puzzle:Why do some refugee flows cause conflict in the host state and othersdo not?

In this article, I argue that refugees are more likely to cause conflictwhen they alter the ethnic balance of power in the refugee-receiving state.5

The crux of my argument is that changes in the ethnic balance of powerundermine the host state’s “ethnic contract,” a bargain that specifies howgroups divide benefits in accordance with the underlying distribution ofpower.6 A shift in relative power is dangerous because it gives the risinggroup an incentive to revise the ethnic contract to a more favorable set-tlement. In some cases, the declining group may refuse to renegotiate thestatus quo due to credible commitment issues. Even if the declining side iswilling to modify the ethnic contract to reflect changes in the balance ofpower, peaceful renegotiation is challenging. Since each group possessesprivate information about its willingness and ability to fight during a refugeecrisis, uncertainty over the other side’s intentions and capabilities plagues thenegotiating process. This pervasive uncertainty—combined with incentivesto renegotiate the ethnic contract—generates bargaining problems that makebalance-altering refugee flows especially prone to conflict.

To test my argument, I examine a controlled comparison afforded bythe influx of Kosovar Albanian refugees into Macedonia (Slav majority, Alba-nian minority) and Albania (homogeneously Albanian) in 1999.7 The Kosovar

3 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2009 Global Trends: Refugees, Asylum-Seekers, Returnees, Internally Displaced and Stateless Persons (Geneva: UNHCR, 2010), 2.

4 Salehyan and Gleditsch, “Refugees,” 361.5 I examine refugee flows crossing international borders. On population movements within the same

state, see Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1978); James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Sons of the Soil, Migrants, and Civil War,”World Development 39, no. 2 (February 2011): 199-211.

6 David A. Lake and Donald Rothchild, eds., The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear,Diffusion, and Escalation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 13–14.

7 The official name of Macedonia is disputed. The country originally was admitted to the UN underthe provisional name “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,” but many UN members now recog-nize its constitutional name, “Republic of Macedonia.” For simplicity, I use “Macedonia” throughout thisarticle.

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refugee crisis provides a unique setting for evaluating the predictions of myargument. As I will show, the comparison of refugees in Macedonia and Alba-nia controls for potentially confounding contextual variables and eliminatesover a dozen competing political, economic, and geographic explanationsfor civil conflict. I then use process tracing to demonstrate how a change inthe ethnic balance of power fostered bargaining problems and violence inMacedonia, but the preservation of the ethnic balance facilitated a peacefulrefugee flow into Albania.

To be clear, my goal is not to suggest that a change in the ethnic balanceof power is the only factor potentially responsible for refugee-related vio-lence. Rather, it is to demonstrate the explanatory power of this hypothesisby leveraging a comparison that rules out alternative explanations for whyone refugee flow created conflict and another did not. Although compet-ing theories certainly are relevant in a variety of other cases, the evidencepresented here shows that the dynamics identified in my theory can be thedecisive factor between violence and stability.

The rest of this article proceeds in five parts. First, I review the literatureon refugees and the spread of conflict. Second, I present a bargaining theorythat explains why some refugee flows cause conflict and others do not. Third,I describe the article’s research design. Fourth, I test my argument using thecontrolled comparison of Kosovar refugees in Macedonia and Albania. Fifth,I conclude with a discussion of promising areas for future research and myfinding’s policy implications.

EXISTING LITERATURE ON REFUGEES AND CONFLICT

Many academics examine refugee flows as a product of violence in one staterather than as a possible cause of conflict in another.8 Given the consider-able ethical and humanitarian concerns associated with refugee movements,it is not surprising that most research views refugees primarily as victimsof violence. However, some scholars suggest that refugee flows can createsubstantial security threats. In one of the first studies on the topic, Myron

8 Myron Weiner, “Bad Neighbors, Bad Neighborhoods: An Inquiry into the Causes of Refugee Flows,”International Security 21, no. 1 (Summer 1996): 5-42; Susanne Schmeidl, “Exploring the Causes of ForcedMigration: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis,” Social Science Quarterly 78, no. 2 (June 1997): 284-308;Christian A. Davenport, Will H. Moore, and Steven C. Poe, “Sometimes You Just Have to Leave: DomesticThreats and Forced Migration, 1964-1989,” International Interactions 29, no. 1 (January-March 2003): 27-55; Will H. Moore and Stephen C. Shellman, “Fear of Persecution: Forced Migration, 1952-1995,” Journalof Conflict Resolution 48, no. 5 (October 2004): 723-45; Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn, “Civil Warand Refugees in Post-Cold War Africa,” Civil Wars 9, no. 2 (June 2007): 200–213.

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Weiner develops a security framework for the study of international migra-tion by outlining ways in which migrants participate in violence in host coun-tries and provoke conflict between sending and receiving states.9 ThoughWeiner examined international migration in general, most other scholars fo-cus on the security challenges of refugees in particular. For instance, in aninfluential piece from the early post-Cold War period, Gil Loescher arguesthat academics and policymakers need to look “beyond charity” to under-stand the potential problems refugees can raise for regional and internationalstability.10

Building on this early work, most subsequent research focuses on howrefugees become militarized.11 One general theme in this literature is thatrefugee communities provide fertile recruitment grounds for rebel groupsbecause refugees often hold grievances against their home state’s govern-ment and have a relatively low opportunity cost of rebellion. Aristide Zol-berg, Astri Suhrke, and Sergio Aguayo offer one of the first treatments ofthe “refugee warrior” phenomenon. They define refugee warrior commu-nities as “highly conscious refugee communities with a political leadershipstructure and armed sections engaged in warfare for a political objective,be it to recapture the homeland, change the regime, or secure a separatestate.”12 Aided by the rise of globalization and the support of third partystates, refugee warriors often succeed in launching or maintaining armedcampaigns against their home state from the territory of their host state.13

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for example, Afghan refugees inPakistan waged cross-border attacks against the new regime in Kabul.

9 Myron Weiner, “Security, Stability, and International Migration,” International Security 17, no. 3(Winter 1992/93): 91–126.

10 Gil Loescher, Beyond Charity: International Cooperation and the Global Refugee Crisis (New York:Oxford University Press, 1993).

11 For a review article devoted to refugee militarization, see Idean Salehyan, “Refugees and the Studyof Civil War,” Civil Wars 9, no. 2 (June 2007): 127–41.

12 Aristide R. Zolberg, Astri Suhrke, and Sergio Aguayo, Escape from Violence: Conflict and theRefugee Crisis in the Developing World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 275. For other importanttreatments of refugee warriors in political science, see Sarah Kenyon Lischer, Dangerous Sanctuaries:Refugee Camps, Civil War, and the Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,2005); Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 2002); Stephen John Stedman and Fred Tanner, eds., Refugee Manipulation: War,Politics, and the Abuse of Human Suffering (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003); RobertMuggah, No Refuge: The Crisis of Refugee Militarization in Africa (London: Zed Books, 2006). For ananthropologist’s take on how conditions in refugee camps are conducive to militarization, see LiisaMalkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

13 The “refugee warrior” terminology is widely used, yet it is worth noting that some scholars questionthe appropriateness of this label on both conceptual and legal grounds. Alternative terms sometimesemployed in the literature include “so-called refugee warriors,” “militarized refugees,” “combatants amongthe refugees,” “state-in-exile refugees,” and “armed exiles.” For an explicit critique of the “refugee warrior”label, see Reinoud Leenders, “Refugee Warriors or War Refugees? Iraqi Refugees’ Predicament in Syria,Jordan, and Lebanon,” Mediterranean Politics 14, no. 3 (November 2009): 343–63.

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Another common theme in the refugee militarization literature is thathumanitarian aid can exacerbate conflict.14 During refugee crises, rebels oftensuccessfully hide among the larger refugee population, which gives the rebelsfood, shelter, and time to regroup before their next cross-border attack.Also, refugee warriors sometimes control the distribution of aid to establishinfluence among the refugee population and legitimacy in the eyes of theinternational community. This control over aid allows refugee warriors todominate the refugee camp economy by levying taxes that are then used topurchase weapons and recruit more fighters. As Stephen Stedman and FredTanner concisely note, a rebel army that “loses a civil war on its own turf neednot admit defeat as long as it can regroup in exile, make claims on refugees,and use international assistance to recover.”15 In some cases, refugee warriorsfind the manipulation of humanitarian aid so advantageous that they attemptto prevent other refugees from repatriating. For instance, after the Rwandangenocide, Interahamwe militias recovering in the Democratic Republic of theCongo (DRC) violently suppressed the attempts of noncombatant refugeesto return to Rwanda.16

One unique contributor to this literature is Sarah Kenyon Lischer, whoconsiders the conditions under which refugee militarization occurs.17 She ar-gues that the political context of a refugee flow determines whether refugeesbecome militarized.18 The most important aspect of the political context isthe original cause of the refugee crisis because it influences the refugees’level of organization and potential for violence. Refugees fleeing their homecountry to avoid defeat in a civil war—termed “state-in-exile” refugees—arethe most violence-prone type of refugees since they usually have highly or-ganized political and military leadership. They often will continue to fightagainst the government of their home state until they can return home asvictors. Other refugees, such as those fleeing targeted political repression orthe general chaos of civil war, are less likely to become militarized. Theserefugees typically will return to their home state once a more stable situ-ation is established. Additionally, the characteristics of the host nation andthird-party actors are relevant in Lischer’s account because capable and de-termined host states can secure their borders and demilitarize refugees.

Thus, the refugee militarization literature enhances our understandingof refugees and the spread of violence, especially since recent statistical

14 See, among others, Sarah Kenyon Lischer, “Collateral Damage: Humanitarian Assistance as aCause of Conflict,” International Security 28, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 79–109; Terry, Condemned to Repeat;Stedman and Tanner, Refugee Manipulation.

15 Stedman and Tanner, Refugee Manipulation, 3.16 At the time of the refugee crisis, the DRC was named Zaire.17 Lischer, Dangerous Sanctuaries.18 For another take on the role of political context in refugee-related violence, see Beth Elise

Whitaker, “Refugees and the Spread of Conflict: Contrasting Cases in Central Africa,” Journal of Asianand African Studies 38, nos. 2–3 (June 2003): 211–31.

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analyses confirm many of the arguments advanced in the more theoreticalliterature.19 However, a major limitation exists. With only a few exceptions,the literature is primarily concerned with cross-border violence betweenrefugee warrior communities and their country of origin.20 As a result, muchless is known about when and why refugees create new conflicts in hostnations, even though it is clear refugees can impose a variety of negativeexternalities on the states that shelter them.21 Idean Salehyan and KristianSkrede Gleditsch offer the most systematic evidence of a connection betweenrefugee inflows and civil conflict in host states.22 In a time-series cross-sectional analysis from 1951 to 2001, they find that countries receiving aninflux of refugees from neighboring states are significantly more likely toexperience civil war than countries that do not receive refugees. The authorssuggest several ways in which refugee flows could lead to conflict in hostnations, but they do not test the observable implications of any of thesemechanisms. Hence, although Salehyan and Gleditsch’s finding helps explainwhy civil wars tend to diffuse across international borders, it creates anotherpuzzle. If refugee flows are a key factor in the spread of civil war, why dosome population movements cause conflict in the host state but others donot?

REFUGEE FLOWS, ETHNIC BALANCE, AND BARGAINING FAILURES

This section explains why some refugee flows produce violence in the hoststate and other refugee flows are peaceful. I start by outlining some of thekey insights derived from bargaining models of war in international relationstheory. I then show how aspects of these models apply to the conditionsthat emerge when refugees change a host state’s ethnic balance of power.23

19 See, for example, Idean Salehyan, Rebels without Borders: Transnational Insurgencies in WorldPolitics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

20 Brief references to refugees producing dangerous demographic changes exist. See Lischer, Dan-gerous Sanctuaries, 14; Salehyan and Gleditsch, “Refugees,” 343. However, the current literature containsno systematic explanation as to why changes in ethnic balance produce violence.

21 For example, refugees sometimes compete with locals for jobs and spread infectious diseases.See Adrian Martin, “Environmental Conflict between Refugees and Host Communities,” Journal of PeaceResearch 42, no. 3 (May 2005): 329-46; Hazem Ghobarah, Paul Huth, and Bruce M. Russett, “Civil WarsKill and Maim People—Long after the Shooting Stops,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 2 (May2003): 189–202.

22 Salehyan and Gleditsch, “Refugees.”23 Following Wimmer, I define ethnicity as “a subjectively felt sense of belonging based on the belief

in shared culture and common ancestry.” See Andreas Wimmer, “The Making and Unmaking of EthnicBoundaries: A Multilevel Process Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 113, no. 4 (January 2008): 973.This broad definition of ethnicity potentially can include linguistic, racial, religious, and other identitygroups. To measure the ethnic balance of power in a specific country, it is necessary to identify whichcleavage is politically relevant.

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Finally, I describe the three specific bargaining problems that link changesin relative power between ethnic groups to civil conflict.

Bargaining Models of War

Bargaining models of war depict the initiation, execution, and termination ofwar as a negotiation process between adversaries.24 Regarding the outbreakof war, the intuition behind these models is straightforward. Since fightingis costly, there is always a bargaining space that each side prefers to war.Therefore, when two states both want a particular good, they should dividethe good according to their expectations about the consequences of a violentstruggle for it. Nonetheless, wars can start despite the existence of less costlyalternatives for several reasons.25 First, states may fail to reach a peacefulagreement when they have private information about their capabilities orresolve and incentives to misrepresent that information. Second, peacefulbargaining can break down because of commitment problems in situationswhere one state would have an incentive to renege on the agreement inthe future. Third, some goods might be impossible to share because of theirindivisible nature.

A particularly challenging bargaining situation arises when the level ofrelative power between two states changes. A shift in relative power modi-fies expectations of the consequences of fighting, giving the rising state anincentive to renegotiate the settlement to more favorable terms.26 Simply put,a stronger state will want a larger slice of the pie. If, however, credible com-mitment problems are severe, the declining state may be unwilling to modifythe settlement. Moreover, even when the declining state is willing to strike anew bargain, attempts to change the settlement without violence might fail.Peaceful renegotiation is difficult because states are uncertain about eachother’s intentions and capabilities, which the dynamics of bargaining makehard to interpret. Indeed, during a power shift, both sides have private infor-mation and incentives to misrepresent their willingness and ability to fightin order to improve their bargaining positions. This ubiquitous uncertainty

24 See, among others, Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (New York: Free Press, 1973); Paul R.Pillar, Negotiating Peace: War Termination as a Bargaining Process (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1983); James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49, no. 3(June 1995): 379–414; Robert Powell, In the Shadow of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1999); Robert Powell, “War as a Commitment Problem,” International Organization 60, no. 1 (January2006): 169–203; Suzanne Werner, “The Precarious Nature of Peace: Resolving the Issues, Enforcing theSettlement, and Renegotiating the Terms,” American Journal of Political Science 43, no. 3 (July 1999):912-34; R. Harrison Wagner, “Bargaining and War,” American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 3 (July2000): 469–84; Branislav L. Slantchev, “Feigning Weakness,” International Organization 64, no. 3 (July2010): 357-88. For a review article dedicated to bargaining models of war, see Dan Reiter, “Exploring theBargaining Model of War,” Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 1 (March 2003): 27–43.

25 For the classic statement of this logic, see Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War.”26 Werner, “Precarious Nature of Peace.”

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in the bargaining process makes miscalculation, and thus war, possible evenwhen both sides would prefer a peaceful settlement.

A related strand of research—power transition theory—also focuses onhow fluctuations in relative power between states can provoke war. Arguingagainst the realist view that approximate power parity yields peace, A.F.K.Organski contends that a rising state dissatisfied with the status quo is likelyto start a war once it exceeds the power of the declining state.27 Monica DuffyToft applies power transition theory to demographic shifts within states andfinds some evidence that civil conflict is likely when the relative sizes ofgroups approach the transition point.28 Though power transition theory re-lates to many of the issues discussed in this article, I prefer a bargainingtheory framework for two reasons. First, power transition theory highlightswhy rising and dissatisfied actors want to alter the status quo, but it offersno explanation for why the two sides fail to reach peaceful negotiated settle-ments. Second, power transition theory only pertains to situations in whichthe power of the rising actor passes that of the declining actor, whereasbargaining theory applies more generally to all shifts in relative power.

An application of bargaining models of war to refugee flows and thespread of conflict is a fruitful theoretical exercise. Following several otherscholars in the bargaining tradition, I shift the unit of analysis from thenation-state to the ethnic group.29 Refugees, as I show below, can have asubstantial impact on the ethnic balance of power in the host state, whichconsequently causes bargaining problems similar to those in internationalpolitics.

How Refugees Affect the Ethnic Balance of Power

Refugee flows affect both types of power—latent and military—ethnic groupscan possess.30 Latent power describes the raw potential an ethnic group maymobilize to compete with other groups. Rising or declining group populationinfluences latent power because demography has major implications for

27 A.F.K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Knopf, 1958).28 Monica Duffy Toft, “Demography and Civil War: A Test of Power Transition Theory,” International

Interactions 33, no. 3 (July-September 2007): 243–69.29 This is not meant to imply that ethnic groups and nation-states are conceptually equivalent. Rather,

I simply contend that bargaining models originally developed for the study of interstate war can helpus understand aspects of ethnic conflict. For examples of other scholars applying bargaining modelsto subnational groups and civil conflict, see Barbara F. Walter, Committing to Peace: The SuccessfulSettlement of Civil Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); David A. Lake, “InternationalRelations Theory and Internal Conflict: Insights from the Interstices,” International Studies Review 5, no.4 (December 2003): 81-89; Monica Duffy Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests, andthe Indivisibility of Territory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Salehyan, Rebels withoutBorders.

30 For a thorough discussion of latent power and military power, see John J. Mearsheimer, TheTragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001), 55-82.

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TABLE 1 Refugee Flows and Shifting Power

Type of Power Description of Power Shift Duration of Effect

Latent Change in demographicpatterns

Ends when refugees leave hoststate

Military Influx of weapons, warriors,and/or hardened ethniccleavages

Can continue after refugeesleave host state

control of the state. In the political arena, population size influences theprospects for electoral success in democratic and hybrid political systems.Though refugees typically lack many political rights in the short term, theirinfluence often grows over time as they integrate more deeply into the hoststate. Hence, the effect of refugees on latent power should be especiallypronounced when actors in the host state believe the refugees cannot orwill not return home quickly.31 Beyond electoral politics, ethnic groups candraw on a large population to intimidate or coerce other groups into grantingconcessions. This demographic change has a direct effect on the ethnicbalance of power because its influence lasts only while refugees remain inthe host state. Once a refugee crisis subsides and the refugees return to theircountry of origin, the distribution of latent power between ethnic groups isrestored to its pre-crisis level.

Military power refers to a group’s ability to wage combat. Refugee flowscan affect military power in several ways. Most obviously, the entry of refugeewarriors with combat skills and recent wartime experiences upsets the levelof relative military power in the host nation. Relatedly, refugees can importweapons from their native country’s conflict into the host state. Less overtly,refugees also might have an impact on military power that is independentof fighters and weapons. Ethnic identities generally become more salientduring times of crisis and violence,32 so refugee flows may improve anethnic group’s ability to act collectively in high-risk situations.33 Changes inmilitary power are similar to changes in latent power in the sense that theyboth affect the overall level of relative power while refugees remain in thehost state. However, changes in military power can also have a residualeffect on the ethnic balance of power that lasts even after most refugeesreturn to their country of origin. Since proliferated weapons, small bands ofrefugee warriors, and hardened ethnic cleavages often remain in the hoststate, relative military power does not necessarily return to its pre-crisis level

31 I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this point.32 Chaim Kaufmann, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars,” International Security

20, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 136–75.33 There is a consensus in the ethnic politics literature that strong ethnic identities can facilitate

collective action. For a summary, see James Habyarimana et al., Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmasof Collective Action (New York: Russell Sage, 2009), 1–13.

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Bargaining problems

Refugee flow

Change in ethnic balance of power Conflict more likely

No change in ethnic balance of power No bargaining problems Conflict less likely

FIGURE 1 Diagram of the theory’s causal logic.

when refugees depart. For this reason, the unsettling effects of refugee flowssometimes linger long after a refugee crisis is superficially resolved.

Why Shifting Power Causes Bargaining Failures

Stable ethnic relations require the maintenance of an “ethnic contract,” aformal or informal bargain that specifies how groups share political and eco-nomic privileges in accordance with the underlying distribution of power.34

Refugee flows that change the level of relative power between ethnic groupsin the host state are dangerous because they undermine the established eth-nic contract by creating incentives for the rising group to renegotiate thesettlement. Of course, competing groups may peacefully renegotiate theethnic contract, but the bargaining process is fraught with difficulties thatmake balance-altering refugee flows more likely to cause conflict than otherrefugee flows. Three potential challenges traditionally associated with in-terstate bargaining—credible commitment issues, private information aboutintentions, and private information about capabilities—exist when refugeeschange a host nation’s ethnic balance of power.

The first bargaining problem involves the rising side’s inability to makecredible commitments. When attempting to renegotiate the ethnic contractduring a refugee crisis, groups will likely bargain over issues that affect futurelevels of relative power. For example, giving the rising group’s members alarger share of the police force enables that group to bargain harder andextract more concessions the next time there is a disagreement over howscarce goods should be distributed. In general terms, a concession at time

34 Lake and Rothchild, International Spread of Ethnic Conflict, 13–14.

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t redistributes assets to the rising side, making it easier for that side tonegotiate for even more at time t + 1.35 Knowing this, the declining groupmay have strategic reasons to refuse to renegotiate the settlement, especiallyif it expects a significant number of future interactions with the rising group.When these expectations are sufficiently high, the declining group will simplyrefuse to renegotiate the ethnic contract’s distribution of benefits even thoughit no longer reflects the distribution of power. As a result, the rising group willhave an incentive to use violence to revise the status quo.36 Thus, peacefulbargaining can fail because the rising group cannot commit itself to restraintin future negotiations.

Interestingly, the credible commitment problem may be more relevantto declining ethnic groups than to declining nation-states. Since states areseparated geographically, pursuing an isolationist foreign policy is a realisticoption in some cases. Expectations of future interactions for states can there-fore be quite low. Ethnic groups, however, do not enjoy this luxury. Livingtogether in a single state ensures that they compete for resources within thesame territory and set of political institutions. This means that expectationsof future interactions—including redistributive conflicts—are often high forethnic groups. Hence, fears that renegotiation now will lead to more con-cessions in the future should be more extreme in intrastate disputes than ininterstate disputes.37

The second bargaining problem concerns private information and in-tentions. Bargaining models of interstate war highlight the importance ofuncertainty, showing that wars can start when states exaggerate or concealtheir willingness to fight.38 An equivalent bargaining problem arises whenrefugees disturb a host state’s ethnic balance of power. On the one hand,both the rising and declining ethnic groups have an incentive to embellishtheir willingness to fight over the ethnic contract to strengthen their bar-gaining position. On the other hand, groups might also have an incentiveto mask their willingness to fight in order to launch a surprise attack oracquire international support. Since neither side knows whether the otheris misrepresenting its intentions, even rationally led groups can miscalculatethe other’s resolve and start unnecessary conflicts.

The rewards for successfully masking one’s eagerness to fight may beespecially high when international organizations are involved in the man-agement of refugee crises. Though technically impartial, the actions of the

35 For this logic in terms of interstate bargaining, see Powell, “War as a Commitment Problem.”36 In another variant of the credible commitment problem, the declining group—which knows that

the rising group will have incentives to renege on any agreement once it becomes the stronger of thetwo—may initiate a war to prevent a shift in relative power.

37 For a similar point about the costs of being cheated in intrastate versus interstate peace agreements,see Walter, Committing to Peace.

38 See, for example, Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War”; Werner, “Precarious Nature of Peace”;Slantchev, “Feigning Weakness.”

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United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other orga-nizations sometimes have major political and military repercussions duringrefugee crises.39 For example, in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide,international organizations working in refugee camps in the DRC fed andprotected Hutu militants who were preparing for cross-border raids againstTutsis in Rwanda.40 Of course, it is possible that neither group misrepre-sents its intentions, but because of the nature of private information, eachgroup cannot be certain of the other’s intentions.41 When the stakes are high,groups may risk a fight rather than concede to an opponent whose intentionsare uncertain.

Moreover, private information about intentions is conducive to indis-criminate violence, which in turn can breed refugee militarization. Selectiveviolence is costly because it requires the investment of significant resourcesto obtain information on individual allegiances. Indiscriminate violence, es-pecially in information-scarce environments, sometimes appears to be thecheaper alternative.42 During a refugee crisis, each side typically lacks suffi-cient information to differentiate between the other’s ethnic warriors and in-nocent bystanders. As a consequence, violence against noncombatant mem-bers of each group may occur. In the shadow of indiscriminate violence,formerly peaceful refugees and their kin group are more likely to join thefight against their ethnic adversaries.

The third bargaining problem regards private information and capabili-ties. In international politics, states with new military innovations sometimesmisrepresent their capabilities in an attempt to gain concessions from adver-saries, which can lead to miscalculation and war. Moreover, states frequentlyare unsure if a rival’s military innovation confers an offensive or defensiveadvantage, so ambiguity over changes in capabilities can exist even whenstates are not bluffing.43

A similar set of conditions holds when refugees change a host state’sethnic balance of power. Most refugee movements take place in regionspersistently afflicted with civil war, where state borders are porous and in-secure. Detailed information on the size of the refugee flow, the location ofrefugee settlements within the host country, and the military potential of therefugees is rarely available immediately. The refugee kin group, however, is

39 Lischer, “Collateral Damage.”40 On Rwandan refugees in the DRC, see Prunier, Africa’s World War.41 This uncertainty problem may be particularly severe in states that recently suffered civil war

because the experience of combat gives each side little reason to trust the other’s stated intentions. SeeAlexander B. Downes, “The Problem with Negotiated Settlements to Ethnic Civil Wars,” Security Studies13, no. 4 (2004): 230–79.

42 Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press,2006), 165.

43 Samuel P. Huntington, “U.S. Defense Strategy: The Strategic Innovations of the Reagan Years,” inAmerican Defense Annual 1987–1988, ed. Joseph Kruzel (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987), 36.

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in a better position to collect this information than other groups in the hoststate.44 Refugees are likely to settle in areas populated by their ethnic kinbecause cultural differences and barriers to assimilation are lower. Accord-ingly, local coethnics can more easily resolve the uncertainty surroundingrefugee capabilities: How many refugees are there? Did they bring weaponsacross the border? What are the prospects for mobilization and collectiveaction? Therefore, the refugee kin group in the host state usually has privateinformation about the capabilities of its ethnic brethren, which consequentlycan foster bargaining problems between groups.

Before moving on, a potential objection to my argument should beaddressed. One might wonder why refugees would allow themselves tobecome part of a bargaining game between groups in the host state. Put dif-ferently, what prevents refugees from staying uninvolved in the host state’spolitics? The answer is self-preservation. During a crisis, refugees face thedire combination of extreme physical insecurity and few legal rights in thehost state. To protect themselves, refugees have a strong incentive to settlenear, rely on, and generally associate with their ethnic kin in the host statebecause the prospects for xenophobic violence are lower and the likelihoodof assistance is higher. However, this strategy has unintended consequences:it confirms the declining group’s fears that the refugees are siding with theirethnic kin and provides the rising group with an opportunity to renegotiatethe ethnic contract to more favorable terms. As a result, the bargaining prob-lems described above can occur even when refugees only seek to maximizetheir own security.45

To summarize, we can profitably apply bargaining models of war frominternational relations theory to the conditions that arise when refugees altera host state’s ethnic balance of power. Three of the difficulties traditionallyassociated with interstate bargaining exist to an equal or greater degree whenrefugees change the distribution of relative power between ethnic groups.Thus, I predict that refugee flows are more likely to cause conflict when theyupset the host nation’s ethnic balance of power.

44 For a similar take on ethnic “reachability,” see Habyarimana et al., Coethnicity, 10–11.45 Self-preservation also helps explain why some refugees might participate directly in violence in

the host state. First, if groups opposed to the presence of the refugees violently target them, rebellion canbe a rational survival strategy. On the risks of participation versus nonparticipation in civil war, see StathisN. Kalyvas and Matthew Adam Kocher, “How ‘Free’ Is Free Riding in Civil Wars? Violence, Insurgency,and the Collective Action Problem,” World Politics 59, no. 2 (January 2007): 177–203. Second, refugeesseeking self-preservation may fight in exchange for assistance from their kin group. Such assistancecould range from providing food and shelter to helping refugees avoid forced repatriation to their homecountry. Third, since refugees generally have a low opportunity cost of rebellion due to their precarioussituation, some might decide to fight to acquire the spoils of war. It should be reemphasized, however,that the overwhelming majority of refugees are nonviolent.

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RESEARCH DESIGN

The Dependent Variable

The dependent variable is the spread of conflict to the host state. My defi-nition of the “spread of conflict” differs from the one used in much of theexisting literature. As noted earlier, when the refugee militarization litera-ture discusses the spread of conflict, scholars generally focus on refugeeslaunching cross-border attacks against their home state from the territory ofthe host state. Thus, the existing literature primarily examines whether thezone of combat operations spreads geographically to include a portion ofthe host state’s territory. By contrast, I am interested in whether the presenceof refugees starts a new conflict—or exacerbates an ongoing one—in thehost state. I therefore define the spread of conflict as organized, politicallymotivated, and reciprocated violence between the host state and at least onenon-state actor within the host state’s territory that results from a refugeeflow. From a conceptual perspective, my definition is similar to those typ-ically assigned to civil war, though I opt not to include an arbitrary deaththreshold for identifying conflicts.46

This notion of the spread of conflict has two advantages. First, under-standing how and why refugees are linked to new conflicts in host states is asimportant from a policy perspective as understanding refugee militarization.Indeed, many policymakers fear a domino effect whereby refugees desta-bilize a host state, creating another refugee exodus that in turn destabilizesmore states.47 Second, from a theoretical perspective, this conceptualizationof the spread of conflict moves the literature in a new direction by go-ing beyond refugee militarization and examining how refugees can createinstability through a different mechanism.

A Controlled Comparison

The origins of the evidence presented here lie in the breakdown of intereth-nic relations in the Kosovo region of Serbia in the 1990s. During this period,animosity between Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians and Serbs escalated rapidly.The oppressive policies of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic fueled thegrowth of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an ethnic Albanian guerrillagroup. When the KLA increased its attacks on Serbian military and police

46 There were approximately two hundred deaths and one thousand casualties in Macedonia’sconflict. Salehyan and Gleditsch’s influential article on refugees and the spread of civil war uses theUppsala/PRIO Conflict Data Set, which applies a threshold of twenty-five deaths in a calendar year. SeeSalehyan and Gleditsch, “Refugees.”

47 For example, when explaining the need for US involvement in Bosnia’s civil war, President Clintonstated, “The conflict that already has claimed so many people could spread like poison throughoutthe entire region.” See “Balkan Accord; Clinton’s Words: ‘The Promise of Peace,”’ New York Times, 22November 1995.

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FIGURE 2 Stylized map of the refugee flow.Source: Created by author in ArcGIS (Color figure available online).

in 1998, Milosevic launched an ethnic-cleansing operation against predomi-nantly Albanian villages in Kosovo. After diplomatic pressure and economicsanctions failed to halt the Serbian offensive, NATO initiated an aerial bomb-ing campaign on 24 March 1999. In response, Milosevic forcibly evicted theprovince’s Albanian population, following through on his earlier threat to“empty Kosovo within a week.”48 As a consequence, approximately 800,000Kosovar Albanians poured into Macedonia (Slav majority, Albanian minority)and Albania (homogenously Albanian) in the spring of 1999.49 Hence, theinflux of Kosovar refugees upset the distribution of power between Mace-donia’s Slavs and Albanians but preserved the ethnic balance in Albania.

Though tragic, this event provides a unique controlled comparison forthe study of refugees and the spread of conflict. Controlled comparisons areessentially case studies that emulate John Stuart Mill’s method of difference,

48 For the Milosevic quote, see Lara Marlowe, “War and Peace Revisited,” Irish Times, 25 March2000. On forced migration as an instrument of foreign policy, see Kelly M. Greenhill, Weapons of MassMigration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).

49 According to the CIA World Factbook, Albania was 95 percent Albanian, 3 percent Greek, and2 percent other. Macedonia was 64.2 percent Slavic Macedonian, 25.2 percent Albanian, 3.9 percentTurkish, 2.7 percent Roma, 1.8 percent Serb, and 2.2 percent other. Central Intelligence Agency, TheWorld Factbook, http://ciaworldfactbook.us/.

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often considered the gold standard of observational research. The methodof difference holds that if two cases with different outcomes are similar in allbut one aspect, the one way in which the cases differ must be responsiblefor the divergent outcomes.50 By identifying variation in a single variablein a historical scenario that otherwise maintains near ceteris paribus condi-tions, controlled comparisons offer a creative response to the fundamentalproblem of causal inference.51 Indeed, controlled comparisons are appealingbecause they mimic the logic of scientific experiments, and some scholarseven suggest that qualitative researchers attempt to follow an experimentaltemplate for case study research.52 Applying the language of an experimentto the Kosovar refugee crisis, the change in the ethnic balance of power inMacedonia can be considered the “treatment,” and the maintenance of theethnic balance in Albania is the “control.”

Controlled comparisons hold great promise, yet a related pitfall exists:the level of control Mill’s method requires rarely exists outside of a labora-tory setting.53 In fact, when using observational data, it is unlikely that twocases are ever identical in every conceivable manner except for the one vari-able of interest. Nevertheless, a controlled comparison can usefully eliminatealternative explanations if the cases examined are indistinguishable acrossthe independent variables identified in competing theoretical accounts.54 Forthe purposes of this study, Albania and Macedonia should be comparableacross the factors believed to cause civil conflict other than ethnic compo-sition.55 To confirm that such conditions hold, the next section addressesthe variables found to be significant predictors of civil conflict in previous

50 John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, 8th ed. (London: Longmans, 1872), 256.51 The fundamental problem of causal inference refers to the fact that we cannot rerun history

to observe what effect an independent variable had on a dependent variable. See Paul W. Holland,“Statistics and Causal Inference,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 81, no. 396 (December1986): 945–60.

52 John Gerring and Rose McDermott, “An Experimental Template for Case Study Research,” Ameri-can Journal of Political Science 51, no. 3 (July 2007): 688–701.

53 See, for example, Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 56-58; Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies andTheory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 153–60.

54 On the value of controlled comparisons, see Dan Slater and Daniel Ziblatt, “The Enduring In-dispensability of the Controlled Comparison,” Comparative Political Studies, 46, no. 10 (October 2013):1301–1327.

55 To reiterate, I am not asserting that Albania and Macedonia are alike in every conceivable fashion.For example, the two states have unique histories. One notable historical difference is that Macedonia (likeKosovo) was part of the former Yugoslavia, and Albania was not. However, the shared history of Kosovoand Macedonia has indeterminate implications for conflict. On the one hand, Kosovars and MacedonianAlbanians may have had more social interaction than Kosovars and Albanians, which conceivably couldhave reduced the collective action problems associated with rebellion in Macedonia. On the other hand,it is plausible that the common history of Kosovo and Macedonia fostered a shared Yugoslav identity thatmade the tensions associated with the refugee flow lower than they would have been otherwise. Sincemany potential differences between Albania and Macedonia have an ambiguous relationship to conflict,they are not addressed in detail here. I solely claim that Albania and Macedonia are similar across thevariables that existing research identifies as causes of civil conflict.

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studies. As I will document, Albania and Macedonia are remarkably similarwith respect to these variables. This allows me to isolate variation in thechange/preservation of the host state’s ethnic balance of power.

Alternative Explanations

Why did the influx of Kosovar refugees produce violence in Macedonia andpeace in Albania? Several plausible hypotheses are offered in the existingliterature on civil conflict, but they can be eliminated on the basis of researchdesign.

POLITICAL CONTEXT

One alternative explanation involves the political context of the refugeeflow.56 Other things being equal, refugees escaping more extreme violencemay be more likely to import arms, belligerent ideologies, and rebel groupnetworks into host nations. However, this explanation can be ruled out in mystudy because Macedonia and Albania received refugees fleeing an identicalpolitical context.

NUMBER OF REFUGEES

Another potential explanation is that greater numbers of refugees, either inabsolute terms or as a percentage of the host nation’s population, cause moresevere security risks. According to the UNHCR, Albania received 435,000Kosovar refugees and Macedonia received 344,500.57 As a percentage ofthe host state’s population, these numbers represent 14.5 percent and 17.2percent, respectively.58 These similar figures suggest the impact of a relativelylarger refugee influx cannot explain variation across outcomes in Macedoniaand Albania.

REFUGEE CAMP CONDITIONS

The conditions refugees encounter in the host state may influence the on-set of conflict. Some scholars suggest that refugees in camps are moreviolence-prone than those settled in urban areas.59 Others point out that

56 Lischer, Dangerous Sanctuaries.57 UNHCR, Global Report 1999 (Bron, France: Imprimerie Sezanne, 2000).58 The percentages were calculated using population data from the World Bank. See World Bank,

World Development Indicators (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000).59 Malkki, Purity and Exile.

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specific aspects of refugee camps—such as size and proximity to interna-tional borders—might facilitate the spread of conflict.60 Still others claimthat capable refugee camp administrators can decrease the prospects forviolence by securing camps and demilitarizing refugees.61 These explana-tions fail here because refugee camp conditions were relatively similar inAlbania and Macedonia. Although exact numbers are not available, it ap-pears that the majority of refugees in both states stayed in camps, while asignificant minority settled with local families in more urban areas.62 Addi-tionally, major refugee camps in both states were located along the Kosovoborder (e.g., near Kukes in Albania and near Blace in Macedonia). Lastly,NATO—the most capable actor involved in the refugee crisis—helped withthe management of refugee camps in both states by distributing aid, provid-ing security, and policing each state’s border with Kosovo. Therefore, theconditions refugees encountered in each host state do not offer a compellingalternative explanation.

REGIME TYPE

The host state’s regime type might account for whether a refugee flow sparksviolence. Some argue that democracy reduces a state’s risk of conflict be-cause elections offer people a chance to voice grievances peacefully.63 Thisexplanation gains no traction in my study because both nations were emerg-ing, yet imperfect, democracies in 1999. The most common indicator forpolitical democracy is the Polity IV dataset, which uses standard metrics andarea experts to code a state’s process for selecting leaders, the presence ofconstraints on executive authority, and the level of political competition.64

These features are then mapped onto a 21-point scale ranging from −10(least democratic) to +10 (most democratic). In 1999, Albania’s polity scorewas +5, and Macedonia’s score was +6. Thus, regime type is not a viableexplanation.

ELECTORAL INCENTIVES FOR VIOLENCE

A more nuanced argument about political regimes maintains that ethnic vi-olence in democracies depends on the will and capacity of the government

60 This is a common theme in policy reports. See, for example, UNHCR, Handbook for Emergencies(Geneva: UNHCR, 1999), chap. 6.

61 Lischer, Dangerous Sanctuaries.62 For a more detailed treatment of refugee settlements, see James Pettifer and Miranda Vickers, The

Albanian Question: Reshaping the Balkans (London: Tauris, 2007), chap. 15.63 Havard Hegre et al., “Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil

War, 1816-1992,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 1 (March 2001): 33–48.64 Monty G. Marshall and Keith Jaggers, “Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and

Transitions, 1816-2008,” available at http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm (accessed 10 May2011).

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coalition that controls the military and police.65 Specifically, governments areexpected to protect minority groups when minorities are an integral part ofthe governing coalition or when elections are so competitive that the mostpowerful party will likely need to form a coalition with a minority groupin the future. This explanation does not have implications for Albania’s ho-mogenous electorate, but it could weaken the strength of my argument if itcorrectly predicts violence in Macedonia. This argument, however, fails toexplain the outbreak of ethnic violence in Macedonia because the Demo-cratic Party of Albanians was an important part of Macedonia’s governingcoalition at the time of the refugee crisis. Hence, electoral incentives for vio-lence cannot account for the divergent outcomes in Albania and Macedonia.

PER CAPITA INCOME

Low per capita income is commonly thought to facilitate violence. Indeed,the relationship between a state’s level of income—usually measured as GDPor GNP per capita—and civil war onset is perhaps the most robust correlationin the civil conflict literature. Even so, the mechanism underpinning thisrelationship is disputed. Some claim per capita income is a proxy for astate’s financial, administrative, police, and military weaknesses.66 Othersmaintain low per capita income is linked to conflict because it measuresthe opportunity cost of rebellion.67 Regardless of the mechanism, per capitaincome cannot explain the variation in outcomes across Macedonia andAlbania because the two countries had similar income levels prior to therefugee crisis: Macedonia’s per capita GNP was US$1,290 and Albania’s wasUS$810. These values place the two nations 121st and 139th, respectively,out of the 206 countries ranked by the World Bank according to per capitaincome.68

INEQUALITY

Some argue that income inequality within a society creates grievances thatmake intrastate violence more likely.69 The Gini index—which calculates astate’s distribution of wealth on a scale from 0 (complete equality) to 100

65 Steven I. Wilkinson, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

66 James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American PoliticalScience Review 97, no. 1 (February 2003): 75–90.

67 Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers 56,no. 2 (October 2004): 563–95.

68 World Bank, World Development Indicators.69 See, for example, Edward N. Muller, “Income Inequality, Regime Repressiveness, and Political

Violence,” American Sociological Review 50, no. 1 (February 1985): 47–61; Carles Boix, “Economic Rootsof Civil Wars and Revolutions in the Contemporary World,” World Politics 60, no. 3 (April 2008): 390–437.

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(complete inequality)—is often used to measure income inequality. In thesurvey year closest to the refugee crisis, Albania and Macedonia both had aGini index of 28.70 These identical Gini scores dispose of economic inequalityas an explanation for the different results of the refugee crises in the twocountries.

STATE REPRESSION

Another plausible explanation involves state repression. Numerous scholarshypothesize that when states repress their citizens, small-scale protests canquickly evolve into rebellion or civil war.71 A standard indicator for staterepression is Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World Data.”72 This data setdetermines a nation’s freedom rating using information on violations of per-sonal rights and civil liberties. In 1998, one year before the refugee influx,both Albania and Macedonia were rated “partially free.” Another commonmeasure of state repression is the “Political Terror Scale,” which uses reportsfrom Amnesty International and the US State Department to code levelsof state-sanctioned political violence on a scale from 1 (lowest level) to 5(highest level).73 In 1998, Albania and Macedonia received equivalent aver-age scores of 2.5. Thus, this theory fails here because Albania and Macedoniawere indistinguishable in terms of state repression.

NEW STATES

New states are believed to be especially prone to civil conflict becausenewly independent states typically are poorly developed and have untestedmilitary capabilities. The first two years of a state’s existence are a distinctlyprecarious time, with the odds of civil war being five times higher duringthat period.74 This factor cannot separate Albania from Macedonia, however,because both states achieved independence well before the 1999 refugeecrisis.75

70 The Gini index data are from 2004. See World Bank, World Development Indicators.71 See, for example, Mark I. Lichbach, “Deterrence or Escalation? The Puzzle of Aggregate Studies

of Repression and Dissent,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 31, no. 2 (June 1987): 266-97; Jeff Goodwin,No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001).

72 Freedom House, Freedom in the World (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2010).73 Mark Gibney, Linda Cornett, and Reed Wood, “Political Terror Scale, 1976-2008,” available at

http://www.politicalterrorscale.org (accessed 5 October 2011).74 Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” 85.75 Macedonia achieved independence in 1991. Albania became independent in 1913, but in 1992 it

experienced a political upheaval similar to Macedonia’s independence when Albania’s Communist Partywas routed in elections after nearly five decades of dominance. Thus, both countries had a comparablelevel of state development and legitimacy. If anything, however, Albania was the weaker of the two statesbecause the collapse of several pyramid banking schemes in 1997 elicited major riots and brought downthe Democratic Party’s government. See Pettifer and Vickers, Albanian Question, 3–18.

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POPULATION

There is a robust positive relationship between population size and conflict.A common explanation for this finding is that states with large populationsstruggle to keep tabs on insurgent activity at the local level.76 This theoryis not persuasive here, however, because both states have relatively smallpopulations. Just before the influx of Kosovar refugees, Albania’s estimatedpopulation was three million and Macedonia’s was two million.77

MOUNTAINOUS TERRAIN

Rough terrain may aid insurgents. Writing in 1937, Mao Zedong argued forthe use of guerrilla tactics in China because “the terrain is complicated andthe facilities for communication are poor.”78 Since then, countless insurgentshave followed his instructions on utilizing difficult terrain. Mountains, inparticular, are thought to favor insurgents since they limit the reach of gov-ernment institutions and offer geography that is conducive to asymmetricalwarfare. The impact of terrain, though, can be ruled out because both na-tions have similar geography. A World Bank study codes Macedonia as 51.3percent mountainous and Albania as 60 percent mountainous.79 Similarly, theCIA World Factbook classifies both states as “mostly mountainous.”80 Thus,terrain did not favor insurgency more in one country than in the other.

NATURAL RESOURCES

Yet another possible explanation concerns natural resources, which are oftenlinked to civil conflict. There is no consensus on which types of resourcesare most likely to provoke violence, but some recent research suggests oilhas a uniquely large effect on civil war onset.81 A common explanation forthis finding is that exorbitant oil rents destroy incentives to raise domestic taxrevenues, causing oil producers to develop weak bureaucracies and institu-tions. This reasoning fails here, however, since Albania and Macedonia bothreceive less than 1 percent of their export revenues from fossil fuels.82 Othersclaim that lootable primary commodities, especially diamonds, enable civil

76 Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” 81.77 World Bank, World Development Indicators.78 Mao Zedong, On Guerrilla Warfare, trans. Samuel B. Griffith II (Champaign: University of Illinois

Press, 1961), 68.79 For more on the World Bank study, see Collier and Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance,” 570.80 CIA, The World Factbook.81 See, for example, Michael L. Ross, “What Do We Know about Natural Resources and Civil War?”

Journal of Peace Research 41, no. 3 (May 2004): 337-56; James D. Fearon, “Primary Commodity Exportsand Civil War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 4 (August 2005): 483-507.

82 World Bank, World Development Indicators.

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war because they can be used to finance the start-up costs of rebellion.83 Thisexplanation can be discarded as well since neither state possesses diamonddeposits.84 Thus, natural resources provide no leverage in accounting for thedifferent outcomes in Albania and Macedonia.

DEMONSTRATION EFFECTS

A final alternative explanation involves demonstration effects. Demonstra-tion effects refer to the process through which the action of one groupcauses similar groups to update their beliefs about the efficacy of the par-ticular action. Applied to the diffusion of conflict, some suggest that whenan ethnic minority in one state challenges the government with violence,it encourages minority groups in other states—especially transnational kingroups—to rebel as well.85 It is therefore possible that the actions of theKLA in Kosovo inspired ethnic Albanians in Macedonia to initiate their ownviolent struggle for reasons unrelated to the refugee flow. Unlike the otheralternative explanations, the comparison of Albania and Macedonia cannoteliminate the demonstration effects argument since it makes the same pre-dictions as my argument: peace in Albania and conflict in Macedonia. Wecan, however, discriminate between the two arguments by examining howthe Kosovo crisis influenced other states in the region.

My theory suggests that the events in Kosovo should cause conflict tospread to other states only if they receive a refugee flow that alters the eth-nic balance of power, whereas the demonstration effects argument impliesthat all states in the region with an ethnic Albanian minority should experi-ence violence. Two states—Greece and Montenegro—allow us to evaluatethese competing hypotheses because they have a sizable Albanian minority,but they did not receive a large refugee influx.86 A brief survey of eventsin these states favors my theory over an account based on demonstrationeffects. In Montenegro, ethnic Albanians did not rebel even though their gov-ernment quickly deported most of the Kosovar refugees that tried to crossthe Montenegrin border. Instead, the local Albanian communities workedwith international NGOs to aid the small number of refugees that managed

83 Collier and Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance.”84 Elizabeth Gilmore et al., “Conflict Diamonds: A New Dataset,” Conflict Management and Peace

Science 22, no. 3 (July 2005): 257-92.85 See, for example, Timur Kuran, “Ethnic Dissimilation and Its International Diffusion,” in The In-

ternational Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear, Diffusion, and Escalation, ed. David A. Lake and DonaldRothchild (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 35-60; Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobi-lization and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

86 Greece received only five thousand refugees as part of the humanitarian evacuation program.Montenegro had 69,990 refugees cross its borders over the duration of the crisis, but most of them weretransferred to Albania almost immediately. See UNHCR, Global Report 1999, 339. Thus, neither refugeeflow was large enough to affect the ethnic balance of power.

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to settle in Montenegro.87 Similarly, the Kosovo crisis did not encourage eth-nic Albanians in Greece to take up arms against their government despitea history of political exclusion and the Greek government’s close relation-ship with Serbia. If demonstration effects were sufficient to cause conflict,Greece and Montenegro should have experienced a level of violence similarto Macedonia’s. Since both states remained at peace during the Kosovo cri-sis, we can conclude that the refugee influx (and the concomitant change inethnic power relations) was necessary for conflict to spread to Macedonia.88

To summarize, the main competing explanations for the divergent out-comes of the refugee crises in Albania and Macedonia can be eliminated.The remainder of this article provides additional support for my argument byprocess tracing the chain of events surrounding the refugee crises in Alba-nia and Macedonia. As Alexander George and Andrew Bennett note, this isnecessary because “both with-in [sic] case and cross-case analyses are impor-tant for advancing theory testing . . . The two methods provide different andcomplementary bases for causal inference.”89 Since this section discardedalternative explanations using cross-case comparisons, the following sec-tions employ process tracing as a form of within-case testing. Sound processtracing demonstrates that independent variable X causes mechanism Y thatin turn causes dependent variable Z.90 The goal of this test is to increaseour confidence that the causal mechanism identified in my theory—and notsome unidentified factor—accounts for the disparate results of the refugeeinflux in each country. Therefore, if my theory is correct, we should observebargaining problems between ethnic groups as the mechanism that linkschanges in the ethnic balance of power to conflict.

EVIDENCE FROM MACEDONIA

The evidence from Macedonia is presented in three sections. The first showshow a rapid change in latent power between ethnic groups—the “direct ef-fect” of the Kosovar refugee influx—likely would have caused a civil war ifnot for an effective international intervention. The second section illustrates

87 Astri Suhrke et al., The Kosovo Refugee Crisis: An Independent Evaluation of the UNHCR’s Emer-gency Preparedness and Response (Geneva: UNHCR, 2000), 68.

88 There is another reason to doubt the demonstration effects argument. If Albanians in Macedoniaupdated their beliefs about the efficacy of rebellion based on the actions of the KLA in Kosovo, theyhad good reason to be pessimistic—not optimistic—about using violence to advance their interests. TheKLA’s use of violence failed to achieve most of its political goals (at least until the NATO intervention) andincited a Serbian ethnic-cleansing campaign that brought great harm to Kosovo’s Albanian population.Thus, it is difficult to understand why the KLA uprising in Kosovo would have convinced Albanians inMacedonia that rebellion was an effective tactic, especially since NATO made clear that it supported theMacedonian government over the rebels.

89 George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development, 224.90 Ibid., 205–32.

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how the “residual effect” of the refugee flow—an imbalance of military powerthat remained even after most refugees returned to Kosovo—eventuallysparked an ethnic Albanian insurgency in Macedonia. The third section ar-gues that the negotiated settlement to the insurgency succeeded because itbrought the ethnic contract’s distribution of benefits in line with the newdistribution of power.

The Direct Effect: Latent Power and International Intervention

Prior to the 1999 refugee crisis, interethnic relations between Macedonia’sSlav majority and Albanian minority were tense but peaceful. Since the coun-try’s independence, ethnic Albanians had pushed for greater economic, po-litical, and cultural rights. They advanced four major claims: equal recogni-tion under the Macedonian constitution, the use of Albanian as an officialstate language, the creation of an Albanian-language university, and greaterinfluence in the nation’s police and military.91 In response to the Albaniandemands, Macedonian Slavs argued that ethnic Albanians were granted rightssuperior to those of most minority groups in Europe and refused to renego-tiate the ethnic contract.92

Despite these differences, relations between Macedonia’s ethnic groupswere remarkably stable because the ethnic contract’s distribution of benefitsroughly coincided with levels of relative power. In fact, Macedonia was theantithesis of the proverbial “Balkan powder keg” waiting to explode. Unlikeneighboring Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia, Macedonia successfully managedto avoid ethnic violence during and after its transition to independence.According to a Congressional Research Service report, “Macedonia was heldup as a model, albeit an imperfect one, of inter-ethnic coexistence anddemocratic rule” throughout most of the 1990s.93 Hence, violence betweenthe country’s Slavs and Albanians was highly unlikely without the refugeecrisis.

The influx of Kosovar refugees in the spring of 1999, however, tested thestability of Macedonia’s ethnic settlement. As refugees poured into the coun-try, the Slav-dominated Macedonian government closed the border crossingon three separate occasions. The logic was simple: keep the Kosovar Al-banian refugees out in order to preserve Slav power in Macedonia. On allthree occasions, Macedonia eventually succumbed to international pressureand reopened the border.94 Nonetheless, Macedonian authorities insisted the

91 John Phillips, Macedonia: Warlords and Rebels in the Balkans (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 2004), 65.

92 Julie Kim, Macedonia: Country Background and Recent Conflict (Washington, DC: CongressionalResearch Service, 2001), 5.

93 Ibid., 1.94 For a game theoretic analysis of the strategic interaction between Macedonia and NATO during

the border closures, see John H.P. Williams and Lester A. Zeager, “Macedonian Border Closings in the

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refugees threatened the integrity of their multiethnic state. Officials pleadedwith the international community to remove refugees from Macedonian soiland threatened to implement new measures to protect the country fromdestabilization.95

Even after Western governments forced Macedonia to reopen the bor-der, the government attempted to limit the number of Kosovars admittedinto the country. Authorities instituted repetitive security checkpoints thatslowed the processing of refugees as they crossed the border. The UNHCRnoted that new refugee arrivals were “down to a trickle, despite assurancesby the government that the borders [would] be open to refugees.”96 Moredrastically, Macedonian security forces prevented the entry of Kosovars whohad no identity documents because they would be unable to traverse theborder back into Kosovo after the war.97 If allowed to enter Macedonia,these refugees would remain in the country and permanently tilt the balanceof latent power in favor of the ethnic Albanians. Macedonia’s interior minis-ter Pavle Trajanov succinctly described the logic of the controversial policy,stating, “We have a delicate ethnic balance. We need guarantees that theAlbanians will go back to Kosovo.”98

In the political realm, the refugee crisis divided Macedonians along eth-nic lines. Albanians in Macedonia sympathized with the plight of their kinand urged the government to open the border unconditionally and to in-crease relief efforts. Parliamentary representatives in the Democratic Party ofAlbanians threatened to bring down the government by withdrawing fromthe ruling coalition unless all refugees were allowed to enter the country.On the other side, the pro-Slav Social Democratic Union of Macedonia lam-basted the government for allowing Kosovar Albanians to challenge Slavsupremacy in Macedonia.99 After it became clear the refugees eventuallywould be allowed into Macedonia because of international pressure, someSlavs instigated riots and blamed the Albanian refugees for the country’sworsening economic conditions.100

The crisis intensified as the number of Kosovar refugees in Macedoniagrew to over 300,000. As ethnic animosity increased, Slav Macedonian po-lice and border guards allegedly abused the refugees, prompting Albaniancounteraction. On 10 May 1999, for example, over two thousand refugees

Kosovo Refugee Crisis: A Game-Theoretic Perspective,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 21, no.4 (September 2004): 233–54.

95 Amnesty International, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia: The Protection of Kosovar Alba-nian Refugees (London: Amnesty International, 1999).

96 Quoted in ibid., 2.97 Kyril Drezov, “Collateral Damage: The Impact on Macedonia of the Kosovo War,” in Kosovo: The

Politics of Delusion, ed. Michael Waller, Kyril Drezov, and Bulent Gokay (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 64.98 Daniel Williams, “Fleeing Misery, Finding More: Exiles in Macedonia Struggling for Survival,”

Washington Post, 4 April 1999.99 Drezov, “Collateral Damage,” 64.100 International Crisis Group (ICG), Macedonia: Towards Destabilization? (Brussels: ICG, 1999), 4.

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at a camp near Stenkovec held a protest against their guards and pleadedthat NATO troops take over the camp’s security.101 One reporter stationedin Macedonia noted that “many refugees saw the Slav Macedonian police,rightly, as little different from the Serbs and relished the thought of re-venge.”102 Ethnic divisions stemming from the refugee crisis had Macedonia,in the words of the International Crisis Group, “teetering on the brink ofcollapse.”103

The rapid shift in power between Slavs and Albanians could have easilydragged Macedonia into a civil war, but an adept international interventionprevented full-scale conflict between the two groups. Western governmentsestablished an unprecedented humanitarian evacuation program that trans-ferred over ninety thousand Kosovar Albanian refugees out of Macedonia.104

Meanwhile, NATO forces secured the Kosovo-Macedonia border and aidedthe government with the administration of refugee camps. Most importantly,the United States and its allies forced Milosevic to sign peace accords. On20 June, the Serbian military completed its withdrawal from Kosovo, and thevast majority of refugees returned home. However, the unsettling effects ofthe refugee influx were not over.

The Residual Effect: Military Power and the Albanian Insurgencyin Macedonia

Many observers incorrectly assumed the prospects for ethnic violence sub-sided with the return of most refugees to Kosovo. Although the mass refugeereturn restored the level of latent power between ethnic Albanians and Slavsin Macedonia, the relative level of military power remained altered. The eth-nic Albanians’ military power was now significantly greater because residualgroups of fighters and stashes of weapons from Kosovo lingered in Mace-donia. The ethnic contract’s distribution of benefits, however, was still areflection of the pre-refugee crisis level of relative power. Following thelogic of my theory, this mismatch between the distribution of power and thedistribution of benefits made Macedonia ripe for a bout of ethnic violence.

Fighting between Albanians and Slavs erupted in Tanusevci, Macedo-nia in January 2001. The village, situated near the Kosovo border, hostedKosovar refugees and served as a KLA base during the refugee crisis.105 Anew rebel group called the National Liberation Army (NLA)—formed from

101 Ibid., 5.102 James Pettifer, Kosova Express: A Journey in Wartime (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

2005), 250.103 ICG, Macedonia, 8.104 Michael Barutciski and Astri Suhrke, “Lessons from the Kosovo Refugee Crisis: Innovations in

Protection and Burden-sharing,” Journal of Refugee Studies 14, no. 2 (June 2001): 101.105 ICG, The Macedonian Question: Reform or Rebellion (Brussels: ICG, 2001), 1.

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KLA splinter groups and whose fighters included both Kosovar and Macedo-nian Albanians—claimed responsibility for the violence.106 The NLA agendareflected the same issues that Albanian political parties in Macedonia ad-vocated in prior negotiations. Specific NLA demands included the consti-tutional recognition of ethnic Albanians, the use of Albanian as an officialstate language, a new census, an Albanian university, and greater influencein national politics.107 The NLA often explicitly linked its use of violence tothe status of Macedonia’s ethnic contract. For example, NLA leader Ali Ah-meti wrote an open letter to Western leaders asserting that the rebel groupformed as a direct result of the Macedonian state’s unwillingness to institutethe reforms ethnic Albanians sought. Additionally, NLA statements even de-scribed the insurgency as a result of previous bargaining failures. Accordingto one communique: “We gave him [Macedonian president Boris Trajkovski]time and space to send us clear signals whether he was going to accept theAlbanians as equals. But this did not happen. Therefore we decided not toallow further humiliation and trampling on our dignity.”108 Thus, the Alba-nian insurgency can be viewed as the continuation of bargaining betweenAlbanians and Slavs over the terms of Macedonia’s ethnic contract.

Consistent with the expectations of the bargaining model, MacedonianSlavs miscalculated the likelihood of an Albanian uprising. After fightingreached his village, one Macedonian Slav remarked to a reporter, “This is acrazy situation. We Macedonians have lived happily here with the Albaniansfor decades.”109 More dramatically, ignorance about the imminent conflictpenetrated the highest levels of the Macedonian government. The interiorminister, for example, stated that he did not possess any information aboutthe existence of the NLA until after the group launched its insurgency.110

Similarly, the Macedonian army (ARM) was thoroughly unprepared for acounterinsurgency campaign, relying on tanks from the former Yugoslavarmy that were technologically obsolete and poorly suited for counterinsur-gency warfare.111 Western military correspondents described ARM as “poorlyequipped, badly trained and led”112 and jokingly compared their counterin-surgency efforts to “war in toytown.”113 Hence, although many Slavs thought

106 On the origins of the NLA, see Tim Judah, “Greater Albania?” Survival 43, no. 2 (June 2001):14-15; Kim, Macedonia, 5-6; Pettifer and Vickers, Albanian Question, 249–50.

107 Iso Rusi, “From Army to Party: The Politics of the NLA,” in Ohrid and Beyond: A Cross-EthnicInvestigation into the Macedonian Crisis, ed. Institute for War and Peace Reporting (London: IWPR, 2002),19-34.

108 “We Don’t Seek Killings and War,” The Guardian, 21 March 2001.109 Phillips, Macedonia, 91.110 ICG, Macedonian Question, 3.111 Jane Perlez, “As Strife in Macedonia Rises, U.S. and NATO Shun Fight,” New York Times, 19 March

2001.112 Zoran Kusovac, “Macedonian Army Lacking Strength,” Jane’s Defense Weekly, 30 March 2001.113 Phillips, Macedonia, 98.

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the effects of the refugee crisis were over, private information allowed mil-itant Albanians to plan a secret offensive designed to claim the rights theyfailed to achieve through peaceful bargaining.

This private information gave the NLA a tactical advantage. Before hos-tilities began, the group successfully hid weapons caches and developedcovert training facilities so the insurgency could begin with a series of sur-prise attacks. In the words of one defense analyst, “The NLA leadership at firstkept its activities highly secret to prevent counter action by either the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) or the Macedonian security forces.”114 Albanianinsurgents quietly transformed northern Macedonia’s underground economyfrom a cigarette-smuggling ring into a clandestine support system for anarmed campaign. Connections forged between the leadership of the KLAand the NLA during the refugee crisis allowed for an active arms trade alongthe Kosovo-Macedonia border. According to a NATO observer, KFOR waspowerless to stop the arms smuggling because the Albanian fighters “ferryweapons, reinforcements and ammunition by mule train on routes well awayfrom roads or known tracks . . . These people have key knowledge of theterrain.”115 The weapons from these smuggling networks supplemented themassive stockpiles of arms transferred to Macedonia during the height of therefugee crisis when KLA fighters hid weapons in Macedonia rather than turnthem over to KFOR.116 By April 2001, over 280,000 Kalashnikovs, 3.1 millionhand grenades, and 24 million machine guns had proliferated throughoutthe region.117

As my theory predicts, uncertainty over relative military capabilities alsoinfluenced the bargaining process. Whereas the Macedonian army had de-teriorated since the country’s independence, the NLA experienced a periodof rapid growth in 2001. New recruits swelled the ranks of the NLA as thegroup “liberated” more ethnic Albanian land in northern Macedonia. NLAmembership expanded even further when ARM indiscriminately shelled eth-nic Albanian villages because it lacked adequate intelligence on rebel baselocations. In one particularly striking example, ARM members established aposition adjacent to the soccer stadium in Tetovo and arbitrarily fired thou-sands of artillery rounds daily into the surrounding villages.118 Since ordinaryAlbanians risked death because of “guilt by association,” many decided the

114 Tim Ripley, “Who are the NLA?” Jane’s Defense Weekly, 24 August 2001.115 Ian Bruce, “NATO Alarm as 1000 KLA Fighters Prepare to Reinforce Rebels,” The Herald, 22 May

2001.116 Robert Hislope, “Organized Crime in a Disorganized State: How Corruption Contributed to Mace-

donia’s Mini-War,” Problems of Post-Communism 49, no. 3 (May-June 2002): 37.117 These figures represent the estimated number of weapons stockpiled in Macedonia, Kosovo,

and Albania. See ICG, Macedonian Question, iv. Precise data for Macedonia is unavailable, but as thediscussion above shows, the NLA was extremely well armed.

118 Phillips, Macedonia, 86.

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best way to improve their security was to support the NLA.119 The group’s ex-act numbers, however, remained shrouded in secrecy because the NLA em-ployed hit-and-run guerrilla tactics. According to one EU military observer,the NLA consisted of nothing but “127 guys in a forest that no one has everheard of.”120 Meanwhile, the NLA claimed it possessed as many as sixteenthousand fighters, and foreign correspondents reported that it had as few asthree thousand.121 Disagreements over the size and fighting capabilities of theNLA frustrated discussions among Macedonian policymakers about whethera negotiated settlement was necessary and, if so, what terms constituted anacceptable compromise. In fact, the Macedonian government squandered anopportunity to reach a settlement when Prime Minister Georgievski rejectedan NLA ceasefire proposal on 7 June and vowed to continue fighting ratherthan negotiate concessions to the Albanian rebels.122

The Ohrid Agreement as a Bargaining Solution

By early August, the NLA controlled vast swaths of Macedonian territory,including the areas surrounding Tetovo, the country’s largest primarily Alba-nian city. As violence continued to escalate, Western governments and in-ternational agencies increased pressure on the belligerents to reach a peaceagreement. On 14 August, the Macedonian government signed the NATO-brokered Ohrid Agreement with the major ethnic Albanian parties in Mace-donia.123 The Ohrid Agreement stipulated that the NLA turn in its weapons tothe four thousand NATO forces temporarily stationed in Macedonia as partof Operation Essential Harvest in exchange for political amnesty. Within ayear, many senior members of the NLA, including former leader Ali Ahmeti,successfully transitioned from an illegitimate rebel group to an official po-litical party.124 Their Democratic Union for Integration received the majorityof ethnic Albanian votes in the 2002 election and joined Macedonia’s gov-erning coalition with the leading Slav party, the Social Democratic Union ofMacedonia.

Why did both sides agree to stop fighting? The presence of NATOtroops in Macedonia for Operation Essential Harvest may explain why eachside could credibly commit to the agreement, but it does not explain whythe NLA and the Macedonian government decided to stop fighting in the

119 Pettifer and Vickers, Albanian Question, 252.120 Quoted in ibid., 252.121 Tim Ripley, “Who are the NLA?” Jane’s Defense Weekly, 24 August 2001.122 R. Jeffrey Smith, “Lasting Peace Eludes Macedonia,” Washington Post, 9 June 2001.123 At the Macedonian government’s insistence, the NLA was not allowed to participate directly in

the peace negotiations. Instead, the major Albanian political parties represented the NLA.124 Phillips, Macedonia, 187.

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first place.125 I contend the Ohrid Agreement represents the culmination ofthe violent bargaining process between Albanians and Slavs in Macedonia:it was acceptable to both groups because it matched the ethnic contract’sdistribution of benefits with the underlying distribution of power.

For ethnic Albanians, the NLA’s battlefield successes allowed them toacquire the concessions they desperately sought. The Ohrid Agreement in-cluded constitutional amendments that granted the limited use of Albanianas an official state language, the creation of an Albanian university in Tetovo,and measures to increase the Albanian presence in the police force.126

The magnitude and pace of these concessions were striking. In a matterof months, the NLA’s violent tactics delivered what the Albanian politicalparties failed to achieve over the past decade. Some of the NLA’s extremeelements wanted to continue the insurgency, but the leadership knew it hadachieved as much as it could through fighting. The NLA never aspired tosecede from Macedonia, and its overriding strategy was to fight only untilits political demands were met. In the words of one NLA leader, “We donot want to endanger the stability and the territorial integrity of Macedonia,but we will fight a guerrilla war until we have won our basic rights.”127 TheOhrid Agreement gave the Albanians an incentive to stop fighting by pro-viding them with benefits under the ethnic contract—their so-called “basicrights”—commensurate with their military capabilities.

In the view of ethnic Slavs, the Ohrid Agreement represented a dis-appointing yet ultimately acceptable change to Macedonia’s status quo. Al-though they granted some meaningful concessions to the Albanian minority,the Slavs maintained their position as Macedonia’s dominant ethnic group. Anegotiated settlement of some kind was necessary because the dilapidatedARM clearly lacked the ability to defeat the Albanian insurgency. Conse-quently, the Ohrid Agreement constituted a timely bargain for the Slavsbecause it made peace with the NLA before violence reached Skopje, thenational capital and largest predominately Slav city. Moreover, Western gov-ernments closely monitored events in Macedonia, fearing the conflict mightspark a Balkan-wide conflagration. Continued fighting between the govern-ment and the NLA was not in the government’s interest because it wouldhave risked a NATO occupation similar to Kosovo. Thus, the Ohrid Agree-ment was tolerable for Macedonia’s Slavs because it preserved their favor-able position under the ethnic contract, and it prevented a foreign militaryoccupation.

125 On third party security guarantees and the credible commitment problem in civil war termination,see Walter, Committing to Peace.

126 An English language text of the Ohrid Agreement is available at https://peaceaccords.nd.edu/site_media/media/accords/Macedonia_framework_agreement.pdf (accessed 5 October 2011).

127 Paul Wood, “Who are the Rebels?” BBC News, 20 March 2001.

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EVIDENCE FROM ALBANIA

The sudden and unexpected transfer of over 400,000 Kosovar refugees intoAlbania is noteworthy for what did not happen. Despite Albania’s lack of or-ganizational capacity for refugee resettlement, there was virtually no violenceassociated with the refugee influx. In fact, the Albanian government evenagreed to accept several thousand Kosovar refugees who initially enteredMacedonia.128

In some ways, it is surprising that Albania managed the Kosovar refugeeinflux better than Macedonia did. According to reporters stationed in theBalkans during the refugee crisis, “The UNHCR in Tirana was a deeplydysfunctional organization in this period, with problems of organization,leadership, and often a poor relationship with Albanian authorities.”129 Fur-thermore, although NATO put troops in both Albania and Macedonia to helpmanage refugee camps and distribute aid, the NATO footprint in Albania wasrelatively small. By contrast, NATO had a robust presence in Macedonia be-cause the country was used as a base for NATO airstrikes against Serbianforces in Kosovo. Albania’s relative deficiencies for refugee relief were notlost on the New York Times, which noted, “It is a striking paradox that thissmall country, whose limitations have pushed so many Albanians to emi-grate, finds itself the safe haven for a wave of grateful refugees.”130

Of course, the refugee crisis did create challenges in Albania. The num-ber of refugees equaled 14.5 percent of the country’s normal population,causing Albanians to worry about the potential long-term economic costs ofhosting so many Kosovars. Most locals agreed the refugees were welcometo stay for the short-term, but if they remained indefinitely “there was aconcern that they may start . . . looking for work in a region with chronicunemployment and receiving better material benefits than local people.”131

Additionally, there were isolated reports of criminal gangs stealing from therefugee population.132 These problems, though not insignificant, were of anentirely different nature and magnitude than the problems associated withthe refugee influx in Macedonia.

In fact, despite the country’s logistical shortcomings, Albania welcomedthe Kosovar refugees with open arms. Several NGOs praised the Albanianresponse to the refugee crisis. According to one, “Shocked by the plight oftheir ethnic kinsfolk, people collected clothing and food parcels to take tothe refugee reception centres, and thousands of families took refugees into

128 For an analysis of burden sharing during the refugee crisis, see Barutciski and Suhrke, “Lessonsfrom the Kosovo Refugee Crisis.”

129 Pettifer and Vickers, Albanian Question, 216.130 Deborah Sontag, “An Overcrowded Tent City ‘Is Beautiful’ to Many Just Arrived from Kosovo,”

New York Times, 8 April 1999.131 Pettifer and Vickers, Albanian Question, 223.132 Judah, “Greater Albania,” 10.

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their homes.”133 A survey of Kosovar refugees found that the overwhelmingmajority was pleased with the reception from local Albanians, and less thanone percent reported poor treatment while in Albania.134 One refugee neatlysummed up the Kosovar experience in Albania when he noted, “It is not ourhome. But it is beautiful to us. We go knocking on doors with our emptybottles, and the people give us water and make us welcome.”135 Thus, theinflux of Kosovar refugees into Albania was remarkably peaceful, especiallywhen matched against its violent counterpart in Macedonia.136

What accounts for the divergent outcomes? The crucial factor is that theKosovar Albanian refugees did not upset the ethnic balance of power inAlbania. This meant that—unlike in Macedonia—there was no need to rene-gotiate a carefully constructed ethnic settlement. Since there was no attemptto change the status quo’s distribution of benefits, the host of bargainingproblems that plagued Macedonia never came into play in Albania. Due toethnic demography, Albania was better positioned to remain at peace duringthe refugee crisis.

Interestingly, the evidence from Albania suggests that transnational eth-nic connections between refugees and the host state’s population might bea force for peace rather than a cause of conflict when the ethnic balance re-mains unaltered. For example, a British Foreign and Commonwealth Officesurvey of Kosovar refugees in Albania provides micro-level evidence thatethnic connections between the Kosovar refugees and the homogeneous Al-banian population fostered the peaceful incorporation of the refugees intoAlbania. Respondents repeatedly stressed their ethnic affiliation to the Al-banian people, even though nearly all of them had never before visitedAlbania. A teacher from Mitrovica reported, “We were told not to call our-selves refugees but Albanians like the rest. We were told we would not betreated as refugees, but as one nation, as citizens of Albania.”137 Similarly,a farmer from Suva Reka replied, “We were safe because we were stayingwith our brothers.”138 When asked about future relations between Albaniansand Kosovar Albanians, the respondents almost uniformly expressed desirefor closer ties. A man from Pec best captured this sentiment: “We don’t wantto be called Albanians from Kosovo, Albanians from Macedonia, Albaniansfrom Albania. We just want to be called Albanians.”139 Therefore, transna-tional ethnic connections between refugees and the host state may facilitate

133 ICG, Albania: State of the Nation (Brussels: ICG, 2000), 1.134 British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (BFCO), Kosovar Refugees in Albania Poll (London:

BFCO, 1999), 4.135 Anthony DePalma, “Kosovars Balk at Leaving the Camps,” New York Times, 22 April 1999.136 As in Macedonia, nearly all refugees in Albania returned to Kosovo after the withdrawal of the

Serbian military in June 1999.137 BFCO, Kosovar Refugees in Albania Poll, 4.138 Ibid., 5.139 Ibid., 12.

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assimilation rather than violence as long as the ethnic balance of power ispreserved.

SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS

This article identified an empirical puzzle in the existing literature on refugeesand conflict. If refugee flows are a key factor in the spread of violence acrossborders, why do some population movements cause conflict in the host stateand others do not? In an attempt to solve this puzzle, I applied insights frombargaining models of interstate conflict to the conditions that emerge whenrefugees alter a host state’s ethnic balance of power. I argued that changesin relative power are dangerous because they produce bargaining problemsbetween ethnic groups that are difficult to resolve without violence.

To test my theory, I exploited a controlled comparison afforded by theinflux of Kosovar refugees into Macedonia and Albania. I first eliminatedalternative explanations by documenting how these two countries are re-markably similar across the variables typically associated with civil conflict,with the notable exception of ethnic composition. I then used process tracingto examine the flow of refugees into Macedonia and Albania. I found thatMacedonia experienced conflict because the refugee flow upset the levelof power between the country’s ethnic groups, which brought about a hostof bargaining problems. Albania, in contrast, remained at peace during therefugee crisis because its ethnic balance of power was unchanged.

Although I only examined refugee flows into Albania and Macedonia,my argument should be generalizable to some—though not all—other con-texts. Colonial powers, especially when operating in Africa and Asia, imposedseveral national boundaries that were sensitive to European politics ratherthan to the distribution of ethnic groups on the ground. As a result, ethnicgroups frequently span state borders. It is likely, then, that refugee flowsin these regions will affect the ethnic balance of power in host states andpossibly cause similar bargaining failures.140 However, an important scopecondition exists: the same ethnic cleavage must be politically relevant onboth sides of the border separating the transnational ethnic group. As recentwork on ethnic identification shows, this condition does not always hold.141

140 This may help explain why Rwandan Hutu refugees caused conflict in the DRC following theRwandan genocide. In the DRC, Rwandan Hutu refugees tilted the balance of power between native Hutusand Tutsis, eventually contributing toward violence against the DRC’s Tutsi population. The persecutionof Tutsis, in turn, provided the pretext for Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government to intervene militarily in theDRC’s civil war. For more on the connection between the Rwandan genocide and violence in the DRC,see Prunier, Africa’s World War.

141 Daniel N. Posner, “The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas AreAllies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 4 (November2004): 529–45.

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Refugee Flows, Ethnic Power Relations, and the Spread of Conflict 215

In such cases, changes in ethnic demography will not create strong incen-tives to renegotiate the ethnic contract. Therefore, the bargaining dynamicsidentified in my theory should be less applicable.

Several areas remain open for future research on refugees and the spreadof conflict. To start, factors other than changes in the ethnic balance of powerare doubtlessly relevant in other cases and ought to be explored further. Re-lated to my argument, future work should consider how refugee flows affectbargaining dynamics in states with more complex ethnic compositions.142

Drawing on Donald Horowitz’s classic study of ethnic conflict, one tentativehypothesis is that the risk of conflict decreases as the number of groups ina state increases since highly diverse countries present many opportunitiesfor shifting alliances between groups.143 Additionally, future research shouldexamine the intervening variables that connect changes in the ethnic balanceof power to different levels of conflict. For example, the influx of RwandanHutu refugees into the DRC played a role in instigating one of the world’sdeadliest civil wars; the flow of Kosovar Albanian refugees into Macedo-nia created an intermediate-level insurgency; and still other balance-alteringrefugee flows cause conflicts that do not develop into organized violence.Tracing the processes and identifying the background conditions that pro-duce these various types of conflict would be a valuable contribution to theliterature.

Finally, this article yields policy recommendations for managing refugeecrises. The previous finding that refugee flows have a statistically significanteffect on the host state’s likelihood of civil war is not particularly helpful topolicymakers. Some might even construe it as an excuse to close borders torefugees in need of asylum. This article aids policymakers by demonstratingthat some countries are better equipped to handle refugee flows than others.Most importantly, policymakers should pay close attention to the ethnic bal-ance of power in potential refugee-receiving states. Policymakers, of course,rarely have the ability to channel refugees to particular countries, but un-derstanding how refugees can upset a host state’s ethnic balance of powerwill help them distinguish between high-risk and low-risk refugee flows.Once precarious situations are identified, policymakers can more efficientlydistribute the scarce resources—humanitarian, economic, diplomatic, andmilitary—they have at their disposal during refugee crises. In doing so, theinternational community will organize more effective responses that mitigatethe security risks associated with refugee flows.

142 I thank an anonymous reviewer for making this observation.143 See Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1985).

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216 D. Krcmaric

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For helpful comments, the author thanks Andrew Bell, Tim Buthe, CassyDorff, Alex Downes, Max Gallop, Thomas Gift, Nathaniel Harris, Laura Kr-cmaric, Won Steinbach, Guillermo Trejo, Erik Wibbels, two anonymous re-viewers, and the editors of Security Studies.

FUNDING

The author is grateful to the National Science Foundation for financialsupport.

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