Let's see. For this particular seminar, if you have opinions on some of those before,
just to explain the theme of this episode as actors and audiences and maybe even gradually towards the end of term conflict resolution,
don't suppose is here to the University of Essex fully at Rice.
We've had a bit of discussion about your life story about how you got to this particular subject.
No, I won't tell you, because otherwise it would spoil the sort of basis of the of the discussion we're going to have.
But I think what's interesting about this subject is it's a very important way of
reminding us about connections between those research centres or disciplinary studies,
which seem also separate. And I'm not saying it's also a good news story.
So if you think you were right, so before I start that,
I'd take the opportunity of thanking Robyn this and I think you culture war centre for inviting me over.
I'm very excited to be here and to present this project which is joint work with children,
record funding from the her school in Berlin and its kind of Trojan Horse copycat or scapegoat unpacking the refugees terrorism nexus.
And as you can guess from the title in this project,
we are interested in understanding the security implications of security consequences of refugee flows, particularly for host countries.
Now, you may wonder why you're interested in this particular topic, and there are several motivations.
So first of all,
the refugee crisis from which Europe is emerging continues to be at the core of domestic and international political agendas for many reasons.
One reason is because in recent years, we have seen an unprecedented increase in the number of forcibly forcibly displaced persons.
So refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons.
And today these people make up 1% of the world population, which is quite staggering.
But also looking closer to home. By the end of 2015, between one and 2 million people fled to Europe,
coming from countries that experienced high levels of violence and terrorism such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
And as a result, we have observed a pretty heated debate in politics and media about the security risks of hosting refugees,
and particularly since a lot of refugees and asylum seekers flee from comfort zones with high levels of terrorism,
the risk of possibly importing terrorist violence, the risk that, for example, terrorist organisations could use these refugee movements,
this population movement could infiltrate them as a Trojan horse to conduct terrorist attacks in refugees from destination destination countries.
Now, if you look at public opinion, a lot of these fears are actually reflected in in public opinion and how people view this this problem.
These are the results of the survey that was conducted in 2017.
In most of the Western developed countries. And what this graph is showing is the percentage of respondents that agree with that statement that there
are terrorists pretending to be refugees who will enter the country to cause violence and destruction.
As you can see, this proportions are pretty high, between 50 and 80% in most in most of the countries.
So clearly, we may agree or disagree with this list, but these fears are real by whether they are grounded or not in evidence, but they are real.
And then, of course, policymakers as well. This is actually this this picture was retweeted by President Trump himself and clearly
illustrates the US administration attitude toward refugees in this case coming from Syria.
And more broadly, yes,
President Trump repeatedly stated that allegedly numerous foreign born individuals have been convicted or implicated in terrorism related crimes,
and some of these allegedly came to us through the refugee resettlement program and also angry at Prime Minister Viktor Orban,
defining refugees and migrants as the Trojan horse of terrorism.
Even the intelligence agencies seem to agree.
This is the Europol EU law enforcement agencies in the latest report wrote that jihadist terrorist organisations already
exploited the flow of refugees and migrants to send individuals to Europe to commit acts of terrorism and may continue to do so.
Now, I've shown you a number of claims related to public opinion policymakers and intelligence agencies about this issue.
But we believe there are reasons to actually be. Cautious or sceptical of some of his claims.
First of all, the first question is whether or not these perceptions may be actually hampered by cognitive cognitive biases.
For example, the German chancellor, Angela merkel,
acknowledged that it's possible that some refugees who have fled the security zones could pose a security threat for Germany.
However, Germany was already a target for Islamic terrorism before the many refugees came to Germany, especially its 32,050.
So the idea here is that there may be other reasons why countries are targeted by Islamist
terrorists or other foreign foreign terrorists that have absolutely nothing to do with refugees.
And so the question here is whether the conflict, they just characterised to some degree attribution bias.
So basically the tendency of individuals to place excessive emphasis on the characteristics of
certain people perceived as outgroups right and scapegoats them at the expense of more plausible,
perhaps situational or environmental factors, such as, for example, some countries foreign policies.
What would this existing research have to say?
How about this question about the possibility that refugee flows are a security threat for the countries that they host?
Well, when we looked at research, we found there was a gap,
a significant gap actually in systematic research that could shed light on this particular question,
because there are some studies that have looked at the association between the number of refugees present in the country and the risk of terrorism.
But when it comes to explanation, these studies tend to theorise mechanisms that are purely at the domestic level,
such as conditions in refugee camps,
which, however, we don't have in developed Western countries or some degree of competition for resources between the refugees and the locals.
But it's there is very little about the extent to which terrorism is diffused from one place to another, follow it.
And basically through this is this refugee flow.
So basically the extent to which terrorism is imported right from from abroad,
which is sort of the framework that we are adopting here, this diffusion framework.
Terrorism moves from one place to another through these population movements.
But also, when we look at the outcomes in these studies, we typically see a rather aggregated outcome.
How many terrorist attacks happen in that particular country, and we don't know much about who perpetrates these attacks.
Are these really foreign actors and where do they come from?
Do they come from where the refugees are coming from or from elsewhere?
Or are these local actors that have nothing to do with the refugees but also against whom are these attacks targeted?
And so as a result, it becomes really difficult to actually systematically evaluate some of the claims that persist in in political and media debates,
as I've shown before. And finally, the third reason to be sceptical has to do with the fact that the debate,
both the scholars debate, but also the political debate, tends to be incomplete.
And what is missing is the fact that current debates tend to disregard the fact that refugees
and asylum seekers are often themselves the targets of violence in the country where they go,
only the countries that they're fleeing from, but also the countries where they go.
And we seen in Germany 2016, more than 2500 refugees and asylum seekers, victims of attacks.
More broadly, we have observed since a lot of the refugees come from Muslim majority countries, a wave of anti-immigrant, anti Muslim violence.
These are just some examples from Canada and from from the U.K. but there are several more.
Which brings us to the research question. Do refugee inflows actually lead to an increase in terrorist violence in the host state?
And most important, if so, if there is some association, how?
And under what conditions do refugee inflows increase the risk of terrorism?
This is the question that we're trying to answer in this in this project.
So to answer this question, remember, we adopt this diffusion framework.
We're trying to understand to what extent terrorism travels through these population movements, specifically movement of refugees and asylum seekers.
So we we developed three theoretical pathways, three possible diffusion pathways.
The first one reflects pretty much the current climate.
Why did refugees constitute a potent force for terrorism?
We tried to sort of theorise this a little bit more. What is the logic here?
Now we know that terrorist organisations have a number of goals.
They have long term goals, but they also have more short term proximate goals which include.
Attracting international attention for being able to advertise their cause more broadly internationally,
provoking their foreign targets, increasing recruitment and transnational terrorist attacks.
So attacks that these groups conduct in foreign countries have been demonstrated to help these organisations accomplish some of these proximate cause.
They could be quite effective.
The same type of attacks against foreign states, particularly when terrorists have to cross borders, they're actually very difficult.
They're not easy at all to conduct. So the idea here is the refugee flows could create this direct physical linkages between the refugees,
country of origin and also the terrorists, country of origin and the destination.
Sorry, them, the host. The states basically allow terrorist organisations to extend their networks and facilitate
their movement to other countries and that the perpetration of terrorist attacks there.
Moreover, when we look at this is this applies most of the last point applies mostly to developing
countries where we have refugee camps and there are studies that have shown that
the radicalisation of refugees this more is more frequent and more likely when
refugees enter in direct contact with terrorists that move across across the border.
So here simply the idea is that terrorist organisations will use will exploit these refugee movements to conduct attacks.
The host country will infiltrate literally. This was the second mechanism or the second.
The second pathway is what we call copycat. And here the basic intuition is that terrorist activities by organisation abroad can inspire local
domestic actors to resort to terrorism through processes of emulation or demonstration of fact.
Various forms of inspiration, essentially. But inspiration is not sufficient to empower groups to conduct attacks.
And the reason is access to resources, training, expertise, skills and other types of weapons.
So basically the idea here is that a successful conduction of terrorist attacks requires requires a number of resources that are not readily,
readily available. And as a result, they make it more difficult for domestic actors to resort to terrorism, in essence.
So the idea is that refugee flows to the extent that these flows can be infiltrated by actual terrorists,
they facilitate the movement of terrorism, specific capital to host countries, which in turn empowers local actors to act, to resort to terrorism.
And this the rationale is because there are more material opportunities as a result of this movement of terrorists.
So basically the idea is not only you have terrorists moving through these refugee flows, but also resources and, you know,
material and human capital that travels through these flows and empowers local actors with grievances against the state to resort to terrorism.
And finally, what I consider to be the most interesting, in fact, pathway is what we call scapegoat.
If you're really looking at how local actors, local citizens from groups will respond to the arrival of refugees.
And here the idea is that large scale arrivals of refugees and asylum seekers can generate perceptions of security threats in the host country.
But this doesn't always happen. We believe that this is particularly related to where refugees are coming from,
whether refugees are perceived as threatening because they come from countries that have
those transnational terrorist organisations that we know are the ones that have it,
like ISIS, for example,
are the ones that have incentives to conduct terrorist attacks abroad because there are some organisations that are purely domestic,
they don't care about conducting attacks abroad, but some do.
And when refugees come from these countries, they will be perceived as particularly threatened.
And also when the host countries or the countries where the refugees go have in the past experienced severe transnational attacks,
severe attacks perpetrated by some foreign groups, does it have to be related to refugee?
All is the idea of the past a vulnerability that becomes activated or triggered
again by the arrival of groups of outgroups that are perceived as threatening.
And how do people respond to this perceived threat?
Well, in this case, fear trumps solidarity. Sometimes people act in solidarity.
Under this particular condition, we believe that fear will trump sentiments and feelings of solidarity.
And as a result, refugee inflows will trigger violent terrorist response by local,
local groups that are meant to intimidate the refugees, the potential terrorists, but also to send a message to the local government.
It is not dealing effectively with the threat. So here we posit that refugees will become targets of terrorist attacks by local groups.
But because we are sort of placing this argument within a diffusion framework, we sort of take this one step further.
And we are basically looking at conditions first in the countries from which from where refugees are coming from, which I sort of anticipated or.
Right. Because the idea here, the rationale underlying the current claims that refugees could be a chosen force or that refugees
could empower local actors with grievances against the state to conduct attacks against the state,
is that basically refugees enable terrorism by transporting people, a.k.a. terrorists,
but also ideas and skills from terrorist organisations in the refugees origin countries to the host countries.
Similarly, the rationale underlying our story about the scapegoating of refugees is similar that refugees induce fear
of terrorism or induce terrorism in the host countries by local actors by transporting fear of terrorism.
They are perceived as potential vehicles and as a result they are punished because
they are perceived to be the cause of this increased sense of vulnerability.
And so basically, if this is true,
that only refugees from countries with transnational terrorist organisation could logically export this type of terrorism to host countries,
because in a diffusion framework, if there is nothing, if there is no terrorism at the source that can be transported,
then we cannot observe the diffusion to the host for the host countries.
And this allows us to basically distinguish between different types.
This is what we call centre effects between different types of refugees,
refugees that come from countries that have these transnational terrorist organisation that could branch out and also generate
that fear and refugee flows and refugees that come from countries that don't have these organisations which we expect.
We should not have any effect on the diffusion of terrorism to host countries along any of the pathways that I just described.
But it is more like what about the countries where the refugees go because they are not all the same.
Right. And so we we are taught that developed countries benefit from more advanced counter-terrorism capabilities by the ability to
basically screen these population population growth and screen these refugee movements for potential terrorist infiltration.
But also they are better able to police their territory, police or border for prevent these types of attacks.
And so because remember the Trojan horse and the copycat past, we really even showed the possibility or the actual,
in fact infiltration of refugee movements by terrorist organisations.
So we expect that the countries that are better able at prevent is basically breaking this potential channels to be less likely to absorb diffusion.
So Trojan horse and copycat mechanisms would be or phenomena would be less likely
in developed countries precisely because these countries can break those ties.
But what about the scapegoat? And importantly, remember, the scapegoat mechanism is based on fear, but it is not based on actual terrorists.
It's enough to be afraid that there is a possibility that these refugee flows could be infiltrated.
And these fears can be easily amplified by media, also by populist politicians.
And on top of that, people that usually more scared, the more exceptional a phenomenon which, of course, we know is the case for developed countries.
And so the idea is that the Schengen mechanism, the fear of refugees because of the risks and because of this potential infiltration by terrorists,
is going to be more pronounced in developed countries.
So how do we test these arguments? Our starting point is the global terrorism database.
For those of you who are not familiar with it, this is the largest database of terrorist attacks worldwide,
and it covers a time period from 1970 to 2060.
So this is our starting point. And we have information based on this database on the perpetrators.
And what we don't know based on the global terrorism database is where the terrorists are coming from.
And this is why we now create this new dataset, which we called GTP Global Terrorism Database Homes,
where we basically looked at all these perpetrators of terrorist attacks and called their home countries.
So where they are primarily that established and with significant and but it's very important
for us to be able to know where these terrorist organisations that conduct attacks brought,
where they are established, where they're based. Because remember,
we are differentiating refugees that come from countries that have organisation that
have a tendency to conduct attacks abroad and refugees that come from countries.
They don't have these types of organisations. Our outcome, the variables.
We have three pathways the Trojan Horse, the copycat and the scapegoat.
So our outcome variables are three different forms of terrorism.
And specifically, these outcome variables reflect the observable and mutually exclusive implications of the pathways.
And what this means specifically that for the current course,
we look at the number of transnational attacks that take place in a potential refugee hosting country.
What does it mean in practice? It's simply the number of attacks that are conducted by foreign groups.
And then we are able to map these foreign groups with the countries of origin
of refugees that are hosted in that particular in that particular country.
For the copycat, remember, this is about emulation.
There are local actors with grievances against the state that may be in power by the movement of terrorist groups through refugee flows.
And so here we're looking at the number of terrorist attacks by domestic groups in a country against domestic targets.
And finally, for the scale, because when we posit that refugees are going to be victims of terrorist attacks by local groups,
we look at exactly that attacks in most countries, the target individuals who are actually refugees,
but also individual like the asylum seeker or others,
might want to share the same nationality as the refugees because we have information
about the nationality of the victims of terrorist attacks in each country.
Now our refugee data comes from the UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
And this is the nice dyadic data, meaning that we have information about where the refugees come from and the country of asylum,
where they where they are hosted, where they go.
I should specify that we are not looking here at refugees that are resettled in third countries where we can get the countries of asylum.
And again, here we are able, because of our good home status, that we are able to distinguish between two categories of refugees,
refugees that flee from countries that have these transnational terrorist organisations and the refugee they flee from other countries.
And this is important because, for example,
what if refugees are selecting right countries where they go based on some factors that also influence terrorism?
Now, basically, if refugees make a selection, a strategic selection about where they go, the idea that this should apply to both types of refugees,
regardless of where they come from, because refugees are civilians, so they care about security.
All types of refugees should care about about solitude.
That basically,
by comparing the effect that these two types of refugees have on terrorism in the host country are better able to test our arguments systematically.
And finally, because there may be a number of other factors that influence whether or not a country experiences terrorism.
In our analysis, which is quantitative, we take into account the GDP of a country, the population,
the type of regime, democracy or not, the presence or absence of a civil war or even inter-state war.
Whether or not the potential host country has conducted terrorist sorry is conducted an intervention in a civil war,
in the presence of a civil civil war in the neighbourhood, the presence of terrorism in the neighbourhood.
So whether a country is located in what we call a terrorism hotspot and sort of our unit,
so many eyes will be looking at each country in each in each year.
So we have a country in the side, but we start from a more disaggregated design.
Now, you may wonder, how do we differentiate between receiver effects or between recipient country here?
For simplicity, we have used the whether or not a country or city member as a shorthand to separate developed and developed country,
because it's a shorthand for a number of other sort of characteristics.
This is just the script purely descriptive what our aggregate data looks like.
So here we have data from 1972, 2015, and the the solid lines, the red one is the shows the trend over time for domestic attacks.
That's one of our three outcome variables. The No.
One, transnational attacks, meaning attacks conducted in a country by foreign groups.
And the last one is attacks against refugees and asylum seekers.
And the vertical bars are basically the total number of refugees in the world,
disaggregated by whether or not they come from countries with transnational
terrorism and countries so that the dot for those of you who are interested,
we have regression analysis with our last with the country in your effects but.
I want to skip to the results first. So what do we find when we run this regression analysis for the Trojan Horse?
We find that refugees from countries that have these transnational terrorist organisations do in fact increase
their risk of transnational terrorist attacks by groups that are based in those refugee origin countries.
However, there is no evidence of this Trojan horse effect in developed countries.
So in other words, we only find an effect,
the only kind of support for the Trojan Horse hypothesis in developing countries and very similar results for the coffee cup.
We do find that there is an increase in terrorist attacks by local groups that benefit from potential terrorist infiltrations,
but not in developed countries again. What we do find in developed countries that yes, there is an increase in terrorism,
but it is terrorism that's perpetrated by local actors against refugees, and particularly against refugees who are perceived as threatening.
However, when we look at the other refugees, the other category of refugees, refugees, they come from countries that are not perceived as threatening.
We don't find any effect. We don't find that these refugees spread anything basic, that they are not associated with attacks by foreign groups.
They are not associated with attacks by local groups against local targets.
And they are also not associated with attacks against refugees.
I remember that when I talked about the scapegoat.
I said it matters whether refugees are perceived as threat, and it matters also how vulnerable the local populations feel.
And one way for us to get at this perception of vulnerability is to look at what is the most severe prior transnational attack,
the attack perpetrated by some foreign group in the country.
And the idea is that when you are vulnerable, before you are targeted before by for some foreign actor, the presence of our troops,
of the arrival of our groups that are perceived as threatening because it could make you vulnerable again,
they could bring back that experience, increases hostility and fear.
And as a result, what we find here is that the more, the greater the perception of oops, sorry,
the greater the perception of past vulnerability here, the more severe the prior attack from the most severe attack in the previous five years,
the more likely it is that as the country hosts more refugees coming from countries perceived as,
the more, the larger the number of refugees perceived as vulnerable.
Given that you are, the larger the number of refugees perceive the threat to be.
Given that you also have high vulnerability, the more likely it is that refugees themselves are going to become a.
So basically, when local populations feel more vulnerable and the inflow of refugees from countries that are perceived as threatening and as a result,
the refugees themselves are perceived as a threat, translates into a larger number of attacks against the refugees by the local groups.
So basically refugees become, in a way, scapegoated for this increased perception of vulnerability and insecurity and insecurity.
However, when we look at the other types of refugees where the refugees in right here,
they come from the countries that don't have these terrorist organisations, so are perceived as less threatening.
We don't find that there is much like that anything and it becomes slightly negative.
So we don't find that those types of refugees are associated with more attacks against refugees, but the other ones are.
So the bottom line here is that when of course, a number of reasons why refugees and asylum seekers might,
you know, might not be welcome in those countries, why a local population might feel hostile to them.
But what we are doing our attention to here is the security driver side of this hostility.
And maybe there are many reasons and we do explore some of them,
but we do find the security matter when people feel physically threatening threats and sorry, they become more aggressive toward toward refugees.
Now, you may wonder, okay, you've shown us some results, but what if there are some other factors,
what we call an observed confounders, things that we can't observe, but they are there.
They make, for example, a country more likely to host refugees, but also more likely to be a target.
And one thing the obvious thing that I can think about is the geographic proximity.
Maybe these host countries just close. It's too close to a terrorism hotspot and that also brings refugees.
So it's basically close to the problem, but it's not. Refugees are causing terrorism in this particular and this particular country.
Oh, what if refugee flows are infiltrated along the way?
So to address this possibility, we develop what we call placebo outcomes.
And what simply well, this simply means we have looked at first transnational attacks.
So attacks by foreign groups that are already there originate from countries, for example,
neighbouring countries whose refugees however are not currently present in the host country.
So if, for example, geographic proximity is simply driving these attacks,
we should see that this particular outcome is significantly associated with with refugees,
with them, with the presence of refugees, even though the two are not causally related.
But we don't find basically the thesis that this is the case.
And also, what about xenophobia? What if the problem is just any foreigner?
Right. We look at actually attacks against foreigners from countries that actually are not sending refugees in that in the host country,
any other sort of attacks against foreigners unrelated to refugees.
If the problem is foreigners, we should see that having some refugees increases attacks against against all other foreigners.
Because the problem is not the refugees such as somebody is. The foreigners are not good.
But we don't find that this is the case again. And what if the relationship goes the other way around?
What if, for example, that the host the countries that host refugees,
they they basically calibrate their proclivity to host as a function of how how threatening the refugees are.
Right. Or what if destination countries are chosen by the refugees based on security?
Can we actually develop a fairly sophisticated instrumental variable approach that allow us to basically overcome this this problem?
I'm happy to talk more about how we do this in the Q&A, but it's basically to take into account the possibility of a reverse causality.
Again, finding this is that this is not the case, that our results are robust even when we we stop this alternative estimation.
Finally, we have conducted some additional tests because you may wonder,
for example, what if these results are driven by Muslim versus non-Muslim refugees?
What if this is not about terrorism in the refugee sending countries, but is really about are these Muslims or not?
We looked at that and interestingly what we found that whether or not refugees are Muslim or not has no effect on the Trojan Horse.
The infiltration of terrorists is no effect on the copycat.
However, and this is very sad, refugees from Muslim majority countries are more likely to be targeted.
They are more likely to be scapegoated. They are more likely to be victims of terrorist attacks, especially in developed countries.
So there is a scapegoating problem when it comes to the Muslim refugees.
We have replicated our results looking at the lethality of terrorism as opposed to the number of attacks.
And we find essentially to say we have looked at differences before and after 911, we don't find any.
We have look at the history of terrorism in the countries where the refugees go,
a result of what if the problem is not terrorism in descending the refugee setting or origin country, but is about civil war?
It's just the story of US Civil War. Interestingly, we don't interestingly, we don't find that this is the case,
which really matter if there is a civil war is how much terrorism by foreign groups there so basically civil war with
transnational terrorism as opposed to any civil war which is in line with what we expect with this diffusion story.
What if refugees are targeted because they have actually been engaged in some form of violence?
Why they are punished? They're not scapegoated. They have literally punished for some bad behaviour.
We don't find that this is the case. And again, not because there is no evidence of violence by refugees,
but because we find the refugees are targeted regardless of whether they engage in violence or not.
And finally, we replicate analysis with a dyadic design where we basically have the origin country and descending country and
we look at at the relationship between the two and find that our results can be replicated with that design.
So I will conclude, what did we find here? We found very limited evidence of a Trojan horse in a copycat.
The fact there is some, but only in developing countries.
Developed countries seem to be immune, but not because there is no problem by not because refugees or asylum seeker are never a problem,
but because the developed countries have already done what is necessary to prevent this risk.
Right. So there is no systematic pattern. This should lead us to be worried about developing countries in.
Terrorism through art, through refugees. However, the current debate in politics and media are missing a key issue,
which is the security of the refugees themselves and this phenomenon of scapegoating of refugees.
So as a result, policies and discourse of the future, hostility and even hatred toward refugees are not making countries safer,
but have the result of causing more terrorism, not less.
And with this work concludes and I look forward to your questions, sir.
Thank you.