Can Violent Conflicts Explain the Recent Increase in the Flow of Asylum Seekers From Africa Into Europe?

Abstract

Between 2008 and 2018, the number of asylum seekers from Africa entering the European Union tripled. In this paper, we analyze whether this increase can be explained by intensified violent conflicts in the countries of origin. We use quarterly data on bilateral flows of asylum seekers from 48 African into 31 European countries. We find that an increase in the number of violent incidents leads to an increase in the number of refugees within country-dyads. However, this effect declined in size over time. Since the peak of the “refugee crisis” of 2015, migration increasingly appears as a self-reinforcing process.

Keywords:

• Migration
• refugees
• asylum
• Africa
• European Union

Acknowledgements

I thank participants of the European Population Conference 2016 in Mainz, Germany, for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

The author is not aware of any conflict of interest.

Notes

1 The terms refugees and asylum seekers are used interchangeably in this article denoting people who formally apply for asylum without normative implications about motives for migrating or legal considerations.

2 For reasons of data availability, in this article Europe refers to the EU-28 countries as of 2018 in addition to Norway, Switzerland, and Iceland.

3 Note that there is some debate on the quality of these data, for example, regarding the question how many asylum seekers actually stayed for a longer time in what for many are transit countries.

4 The following African countries are included in this study: Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.