Why do states accept refugees? While there are a number of factors that influence a state’s decision to accept refugees, interstate relations play an important yet understudied role in refugee flows. In this paper, we build on previous work that has suggested that states with an adversarial relationship will be more likely to accept refugees. We incorporate existing conceptualization and theory from the rivalry literature and extend this logic to state strategy of refugee acceptance to provide one of the first empirical evaluations of refugee acceptance by states. Specifically, we argue that the issues rivals are contending over will change the incentives and disincentives for admitting a rival’s refugees. We anticipate that rivals disputing over ideology will be more likely to accept their rival’s refugees than rivals contending over other rivalry types. We test and find evidence for our arguments using a data set of all directed dyads from 1960 to 2006.
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