Violence and Displacement in Civil War. Evidence from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)

This paper explores the relationship between violence and displacement during civil war focusing on two different forms of population movements (i.e. incoming and outgoing), and two different forms of violence (i.e. direct and indirect). The paper explores the relationship between displacement and violence at the local level in the context of a civil war fought conventionally using a novel dataset with fine-grained municipal level data from the region of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). First, the evidence indicates that, in a civil war context, refugee flows and violence are interrelated in multiple ways: the arrival of internal refugees in a locality promotes the perpetration of direct violence against civilians; this, in turn, triggers the departure of people from the locality when the other group approaches. Second, the paper suggests that exogenous and endogenous to the war factors combine to generate patterns of resettlement. Prewar political alignments show to be a significant factor accounting for incoming and outgoing flows at the local level; the latter indicates that displacement can be used to cleanse the territory from political enemies. In addition, wartime variables such as bombings or executions are also significant to explain refugee flows. Finally, the Spanish case suggests that the demographic changes provoked by displacement, combined with the lethality of the conflict, are likely to have long-term political consequences.