4.4 Refugee (re)integration - Graeme Blair

I'm happy to be here and present this research, which is the result of a practitioner-researcher partnership between Mercy Corps Nigeria and myself, Rebecca Lipman, Chad Hazlitt, and Elizabeth Nugent. And what we try to address is what I see is one of the biggest policy problems in northeast Nigeria in the last five to seven years, which is that there have been a set of people who are trying to return from an association or involvement in the violent extremist group Boko Haram back into their communities. And the problem that they have faced is that communities are not willing to have them come back. So this is a varied set of people. Some of them are former fighters, and some of them have held more support roles as cooks, drivers, and some of them, some women who have been forced into marriages with Boko Haram fighters. So these people are coming back, and communities are worried about the security implications of these people who, from their perspective, went into the forest, they don't know what happened then, and now are coming back into town. So they don't know whether they were, quote unquote, radicalized, and they don't know what their intentions are in coming back into the community. And so in the first instances of people coming out, one, they've been segregated. So in my first visit to Maiduguri in 2015, in the IDP camps, you'll see a set of people that are set off from the rest of the camp who are these former associates, who aren't allowed to even sit with their families and kind of fellow villagers. And more recently, there have been a set of more systematic efforts to bring these returnees back into their communities from the government, which has a set of pathways for returnees to come from government-held detention facilities back into their communities. And in several of the earliest cases, these truckfuls of returnees were rejected from their communities, and they refused to allow them to come back in. They felt that they hadn't been provided information on who they are and what kind of rehabilitation process they had gone through, if any. And so this is a big problem from the perspective of addressing the possible return to conflict, because this is a set of people who have potentially been part of this violent extremist group, and if not provided an opportunity to go back to their community, may stay in these government detention facilities or even return to the conflict. So what can we do about this? First, I want to give you a sense of what this kind of means in the community in terms of community acceptance. So we conducted a survey in 2017 in internally displaced persons camps in northeast Nigeria to try to understand both what the barriers to acceptance were and also how people were thinking about it. So we found quite extreme attitudes towards how returnees should be treated. 90% of people felt that they should be tortured, either for a kind of retribution or to obtain information about the armed group. And about 50% even supported capital punishment for some of the returnees who had the most extreme roles. In terms of community support for actually accepting people back into their own community, only about 50% of people said that they were willing to accept a former member of Boko Haram back into their community. And when you probe them to try to understand why that is, again, it's a mix of both fear about what they would do in their community and anger toward their past actions. Drilling down into what that looks like in terms of the social, economic, and political reintegration, we asked people what kinds of activities they would be willing to allow people to do when they came back. And so we asked a range of different behavioral intentions about whether you would allow them to come back, whether you would allow them to participate in community meetings, whether you would allow them to run for office, and whether you would vote for them, etc. And so these all ranged around 50%. So what can we do about this? We test one particular idea, which is that trusted authorities may be able to change minds and shift norms about important pro-social behaviors. This idea came from a set of focus groups that we conducted in 2016 with populations that could be potentially accepting returnees, and this idea that people sought advice and took cues from leaders came up again and again in our interviews. So people said that we would seek guidance from our leaders, and if they said to welcome them back, we would. So given the background of this conflict setting and the fact that people have these extremely negative views towards people coming back, I think it's quite striking that people would be willing, on the basis of a cue from their leader, to shift. And so we wanted to test out whether this was a systematic tool that could be used by the government and civil society agencies. We're not the only ones who notice this. This is a widespread idea both in Nigeria and in other conflict contexts, where trainings and built networks of local leaders, and particularly religious leaders, have been used to try to elevate the voices of these leaders and help lead to pro-social behavior change. So why might this work? Trusted authorities, we know from a range of literature from American politics, are listened to by people who are looking for cues about what they should believe and what kinds of decisions they should make. They're also signals of social norms. So people often make decisions based on what they think other people are going to do and what they think other people think that they should do, and leaders provide a signal of those social norms. We're going to focus on religious leaders in particular, in part because these are often highly trusted leaders. These are people that in this context are trusted by 97% of people, more trusted than any other institution in northeast Nigeria. And they also have, I think, two particular characteristics among leaders that are relevant. The first is that they have the ability to legitimately use religious texts as a means for leading to attitudinal and behavior change, and they're also sought out for advice on a variety of different topics. And so people are actively going and trying to find out what their local imams think about issues related to resolving the conflict. So what did we actually do? We worked with a senior Islamic cleric in Maiduguri, and we recorded a set of audio messages in collaboration with him, in which we shared findings from our focus groups about the barriers to community acceptance, and he developed a set of messages from religious texts that he thought drew in those. And in fact, he and a Christian bishop that we worked with were quite eager participants in the partnership because they had already been working to shift attitudes around community acceptance. And so he drew on some of his own ideas there. And so there were three elements to the message. He emphasized the idea of forgiveness from a variety of Islamic texts, he announced that he himself would forgive fighters, and he called on his followers both to forgive them and to accept them back into the community. We played either that message or, to a randomly assigned control group, we played a placebo message about an unrelated topic, which was about sanitation and health, in naturalistic small group settings as people listen to the radio normally. Afterward, we asked a set of outcome questions related to whether you would accept people back into your community and also what you continue to think about these former associates of Boko Haram. So what did we find? Let me orient you to this plot briefly. On the x-axis are these two conditions that we randomly assign people into: this placebo in which they received an audio message about health and sanitation, and on the right, this message from this trusted religious leader. On the y-axis is the amount of support for the behavioral intention, for example, allowing former associates to reintegrate, to allow them in community meetings, ranging from about 40 to around 80. And so what we can see across this range of different kinds of behavioral intentions, from those that are already supported around half, move up between 9 and 13 percentage points. So across all of these different behaviors that are more and less intensive ways of coming back into the community, this message from a community leader seemed to have really shifted people's willingness to accept people back into their community. Similarly, we looked at whether this message shifted social norms, so shifted these perceptions of what other people think, what other people are doing, and think that you should do. And so we asked people whether they thought that their neighbors would allow people to return to their community, whether their community leaders and local religious leaders thought they should do, and so on. Obviously, we find that local religious leaders, people's perceptions about local religious leaders, were shifted. But more surprisingly, we also find that it shifts people's perceptions of what their neighbors are doing and think that they should do by similar rates. So in terms of the policy implications, I think this provides initial evidence that provides motivation for using the tool of elevating the voices of trusted local leaders to shift both attitudes and also behavioral intentions towards these important pro-social behaviors. I think additional research is needed to understand what kinds of leaders and what circumstances this kind of tool is going to be effective. And a major caveat is that the messages did not shift people's underlying feelings towards former associates of Boko Haram. So levels of anger and levels of fear towards these former associates were not shifted at all. So this is a case of shifting social norms, shifting behavioral intentions, without changing those underlying feelings toward this group, which is a common feature of some of these behavioral science findings. So I'll give you a brief teaser for two other parts of this experiment that we're still writing up. One is that we wanted to know whether we could change beliefs about the malleability of attitudes, because one of the major problems here is that people aren't sure whether these former associates have, quote unquote, de-radicalized. And so there's a set of social psychological interventions to shift your belief in other people being able to change their minds. And we find that that's quite effective at convincing people that these former associates might be able to change their mind when they come back into the community. And second, using a literature from conflict resolution which finds that apologies from individuals or groups about the actions during conflict of another group can also shift attitudes and behaviors, and we also find some evidence of that in this context from a related experiment. So I want to leave on a kind of happy note, or a positive note at least. In 2018, we found these really quite negative attitudes towards former associates of Boko Haram, and these have really improved in the last couple of years. So a survey by the Managing Exits from Conflict project, which is led by Siobhan O'Neill, who's presenting in one of the other rooms, shows that those attitudes have gone up by about 20 percentage points since our first surveys in 2017 and 2018. So now about 70% of people say that they would be willing to accept these former members. And so a speculative conclusion of this is that the widespread use of messaging in the wild by religious leaders may have been one component in shifting these important behavioral intentions. So thank you very much.