Welcome reception? The local sources of refugee inclusion and cooperation

The number of forcibly displaced persons globally has nearly doubled in the last decade. These trends have inspired a wave of research focusing on the security implications of forced migration. Yet this focus obscures the varied ways that host communities respond to such dramatic change.

This project, by contrast, examines the local politics of refugee inclusion, asking why some citizens are willing to host refugees and share vital resources while others are not. We focus on refugee inclusion in Uganda: host to the fourth largest refugee population.

We hypothesise that where hosts feel agency over the refugee settlement process, they should be more inclusionary, and suggest that in the Ugandan context, local land tenure rules play a key role in shaping perceptions of agency.

The project evaluates these claims using a household survey, a lab-in-the-field experiment, and in-depth interviews across refugee hosting regions.

The combination of observational, experimental, and qualitative data provides a rigorous means of building and testing our theory, while enabling us to generalise beyond Uganda.

By analysing how local politics affects inclusionary attitudes, we aim to provide a new framework for linking institutional and social-psychological approaches in the study of forced migration, while identifying the local factors that facilitate trust and cooperation between refugees and host communities.