Leaving, Staying or Coming Back? Migration Decisions During the Northern Mali Conflict

Abstract

This paper uses a unique dataset to analyse the migration dynamics of refugees, returnees and, internally displaced people from the Northern Mali conflict. Individuals were interviewed monthly using mobile phones. Our results cast light on the characteristics of these three groups before and after displacement. In addition, we test how employment and security were related to migration status, as well as the willingness to go back home. Individuals who were employed while displaced were less willing to go back to the North, while those who owned a gun were more likely to plan to go back. Additional indicators of personal safety played a lesser role.

Acknowledgements

We benefitted from feedback and suggestions from Andrew Dabalen, José Calix, the Editor Manny Teitelbaum, and two anonymous referees. We are grateful to participants to the SITES/IDEAs 2016 conference for their helpful comments. The usual caveats apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplementary Materials are available for this article which can be accessed via the online version of this journal available at https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2018.1510119

Notes

1. All data from this survey can be downloaded from http://www.gisse.org/pages/enquete-continue-sur-les-deplaces-refugies/enquete-sur-les-deplaces-et-les-refusgies.html and from: http://bit.ly/2nsxSd6.

2. To avoid issues of reverse causality, we have also tried to estimate a model with lagged coefficients. The coefficient of gun ownership remains positive and significant. On the other hand, even if the coefficient of employment is still negative, the estimate is quite noisy, so it is no longer statistically significant. Large confidence intervals are also obtained if we estimate a fixed-effect model with lagged values as instruments for contemporaneous ones.

We have also examined the likelihood of having returned to Northern Mali rather than the willingness to go back by estimating a similar fixed effect specification to the one shown in Table 3. However, as discussed in Section 5, the transition probability from being internally displaced or in a refugee camp to having returned to Northern Mali is extremely low. Given this low variability of the dependent variable, it is not surprising that most estimates become statistically insignificant. Only refugee status is consistently negatively associated with having return. Tables available upon request.