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The 1979 census conducted across the vast expanse of the Soviet Union revealed that the make-up of the country's population had undergone enormous change. The census recorded low birth-rates among the Slavic population relative to their Central Asian compatriots, among other trends. The results were worrisome to Soviet planners in that they feared that these domestic population trends were going to undermine the country's power. At the same time, Soviets faced the defeat of communist allies in Afghanistan at the hands of fighters beholden to religion, and an Islamic revolution in Iran. What these dynamics revealed was a complex interplay between domestic, regional and international politics. Interpreted through the lens of population dynamics, the convergence of these events revealed 1979 to be a critical turning point in the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

This essay explores the impact of the end of the Cold War on the counter-refugee-crisis policies of the United Nations and its strongest member states. I argue that during the Cold War, state interests were subordinated to the refugee interests for two reasons. First, refugees were few in number and tended to be educated, skilled, and informed (valuable). Second, the WWII experience of the Holocaust in Europe led to the institutionalization of concern for the fate of persecuted groups at the expense of state interests. After the end of the Cold War, however, a number of the Soviet Union's allies and successor states began to fail, and these state failures, combined with unprecedented access to information about living conditions abroad, led to refugee flows that impacted powerful states. Whereas the preferred counter-refugee crisis policy during the Cold War was resettlement, after the Cold War it shifted to repatriation: voluntary repatriation in the best cases, and forced repatriation in the worst. The essay's primary focus is an assessment of the consequences of this policy shift from resettlement to repatriation of refugees. After introducing a number of important empirical findings regarding the frequency and scale of contemporary refugee crises, I conclude that although in some cases the policy of supporting voluntary repatriation is a good thing, it may have the unintended consequence of involuntary or forced repatriations as receiving states feel little compulsion to resettle these refugees within their borders.

Despite increasing technical sophistication, the quantitative literature has made little progress in forecasting ethnic violence. Nevertheless, recent efforts in predicting the location of ethnic violence from the spatial ethnic distribution seem to be a major step forward. In 2007, Lim, Metzler, and Bar-Yam proposed an agent-based model that takes as input the ethnic map of a country and derives from it the predicted locations of ethnic violence. The model rests on the assumption that spatial group clusters of a certain critical size are most likely to display ethnic violence. Their model achieves a remarkable level of agreement between predicted and observed locations of violence. Our article scrutinizes this exercise. We show that their analysis suffers from a biased selection of groups and regions, and that the null hypothesis and unit of analysis are inadequate. The proclaimed usefulness of the model for predicting violence in new cases is made difficult by the fact that the model does not generalize from one case to another. We conclude that the model provides little advance on prior research.

Cover; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Dedication; Table of Contents; List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; List of Contributors; PART I: Introduction: Concepts and Overview; 1. Demography, Migration, Conflict, and the State: The Contentious Politics of Connecting People to Places; Introduction; Migration, Conflict, and International Relations: A Review of the Literature; Sons of the Soil Conflict: Connecting People to Places; Overview of the Book: New Perspectives on Migration, Demography, Conflict, and the State; Conclusion; Notes; References

While migration and population settlement have always been an important feature of political life throughout the world, the dramatic changes in the pace, direction, and complexity of contemporary migration flows are undoubtedly unique. Despite the economic benefits often associated with global, regional, and internal migration, the arrival of large numbers of migrants can exacerbate tensions and give rise to violent clashes between local populations and recent arrivals. This volume takes stock of these trends by canvassingthe globe to generate new conceptual, empirical, and theoretical contributions. The analyses ultimately reveal the critical role of the state as both an actor and arena in the migration-conflict nexus.