The Informationist

How to Prevent Future Conflicts

Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack’s “Carriers of Conflict” in the current issue of the Atlantic tells a sobering tale of conflicts likely to come. They describe the flow of refugees from Iraq into neighboring countries, including an estimated 700,000 fleeing into Jordan, 450,000 into Syria, and smaller or unknown numbers landing elsewhere. Their article bears an ominous subheading: “For a preview of future instability and war in the Middle East, watch where the Iraqi refugees are going.”

Their assertion that “all too often, where large numbers of refugees go, instability and war closely follow,” however, omits a critical condition. Refugee crises are typically precursors to greater instability and conflict unless the states housing the refugees integrate them into their own societies. Such integration is difficult and expensive, but it has succeeded in reducing (not eliminating) tension in many historically troubled regions.

The Turkish-Greek conflict of 1919-23 created more than two million refugees. Hundreds of thousands of Greek Orthodox Christians fled west, into Western Thrace, while hundreds of thousands Muslims headed east, towards Anatolia. With the help of various international aid agencies, Greece and Turkey resettled their respective ethnic kinsman and co-religionists, and integrated them and their families into their respective ethno-nationalist states. While considerable tension remained between these neighbors, those resettlements ended a century of full-scale wars between them.

The partition of British India into the independent states of India and Pakistan precipitated what was likely history’s largest refugee crisis—often estimated at fifteen million. Once again, both states resettled and integrated their arriving kinsmen and co-religionists; Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hails from a resettled family. While subsequent wars between India and Pakistan have erupted, their primary cause was a border dispute bearing little direct relationship to the refugee crisis.

In Europe, the end of the Second World War led to a mass exodus of ethnic Germans, north from the Sudetenland and west across the Oder-Neisse line. Germany’s resettlement and integration of these refugees undoubtedly contributed to the stability that its Czech and Polish borders have enjoyed for more than half a century.

Finally, in the Middle East itself, Israel has an exemplary record of resettling wave after wave of refugees, initially from war-torn Europe, but subsequently from across the Arab world, Iran, and Ethiopia. Jordan, the only Arab state to integrate sizable numbers of refugees from western Palestine, boasts the least radicalized Palestinian population in the region. The rest of those refugees—most of whom reside in multi-generational UN-administered camps, surrounded by kinsman who refuse to resettle them—remain the greatest sources of both radicalism and instability in the region.

Refugee crises are always horrible, bloody, miscarriages of justice that uproot innocents from their longstanding homes. Injustice notwithstanding, history has taught us how stabilize a jittery region. Resettlement and integration reduce tension and promote stability. Insistence that refugees fester as permanent outsiders make radicalization, instability, and conflict inevitable.

Many of the refugees from Iraq have been fortunate enough to land among co-religionists and fellow Arabs. Unfortunately, most of their host countries boast a dismal tack record on refugee issues. The international community seems unlikely to urge them to behave more responsibly in the future than they have in the past. All of which leads inexorably to the conclusion that Byman and Pollack are likely correct: these refuges are harbingers of future conflict.

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 10/19 at 06:31 PM in Foreign Affairs and the World beyond Our Borders