When to go? - A conjoint experiment on social networks, violence and forced migration decisions in Eastern and Southeastern Turkey

Keywords: migration, conjoint experiment, violence, Turkey
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 25

Abstract

How do heterogeneous patterns of violence affect people's decision to flee? Previous research generally examines how the scale of violence affects forced displacement at the national or sub-national level. This research focuses on different patterns of violence (frequency, proximity, perpetrator type, targeting patterns) and how they affect individuals’ decision-making, exploiting a conjoint experiment in South-eastern and Eastern Turkey to provide individual-level evidence. The results suggest that intense indiscriminate violence nearby forces individuals into the decision to leave. In contrast to previous studies, we find that the fear for repeated violence plays a more important role in flight decision-making than the attack frequency. The survey experiment reveals that violence committed by the government makes a decision to flee abroad more likely than rebel violence and that individuals with support networks abroad are less responsive to patterns of violence, making flight decisions more independently. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on forced migration with individual-level evidence on the decision-making process underlying flight reactions to violence, with a disaggregation of how ordinary citizens respond to different types of violence and with additional evidence how social networks shape flight decisions.