Migration as a Weapon in Theory and in Practice

Editor's note: This article is adapted in part from Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion and Foreign Policy by Kelly M. Greenhill. © 2010 by Cornell University. It is used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.In late March 2016, ambassadors from the twenty-eight European Union (EU) member states concluded what was supposed to be a secret deal to curtail further in-migration leaders of eight countries in the Horn of Africa. They were responding to mounting fears and anxiety within the EU about the migration crisis that brought more than one million people to Europe in 2015 alone. In exchange for a promise to help stanch unregulated flows of people to Europe, the EU agreed to provide the African countries about $50 million in monetary and in-kind aid and equipment over the following three years.1This deal followed closely on the heels of far more broadly publicized migration deal between the EU and Turkey, which was concluded, as one observer put it, with EU policymakers' backs seemingly against the wall, and in an atmosphere of palpable panic2 In exchange for permitting Greece to return to Turkey all irregular migrants arriving after 20 March 2016, the EU agreed to assist the regime of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in meeting the mounting burden of hosting approximately three million refugees via provision of more than euro6 billion in aid and increased resettlement of Syrian refugees residing in Turkey.3 The EU also agreed to accelerate visa liberalization for Turkish nationals and to reenergize previously moribund talks on Turkish EU membership, both of which Turkey had been seeking for years without success.4 Conclusion of the EU-Turkey deal followed a series of threats by Turkish officials that effectively amounted to, We're tired of waiting. Either concede to our array of demands or face the migration-related consequences of failing to do so.5Although widely popular some segments of society within EU member states, both migration deals have been widely criticized as inhumane, immoral, and possibly illegal, particularly in light of creeping authoritarianism within Turkey and the fact that parties to the Horn of Africa deal include despots such as Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, a leader who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges that he directed a campaign of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other crimes against humanity during the country's Darfur conflict.6Arguably more important, however, is that in addition to lambasting these deals on their own terms, critics have expressed concerns about what precedents might be set by these seemingly Faustian bargains and what these deals may portend for the future of refugee protection more generally. Concerns about the future security and stability of the regimes that host refugees are indisputably valid, especially given recent developments in this regard in Australia, in certain EU member states, and beyond.7 However, future-focused claims about the precedents that might be set by these migration deals are curiously and potentially dangerously ahistorical. This is because in point of fact the exploitation of refugees and migrants, which we might politely refer to as foreign-policy bargaining chips-and less politely, as coercive weapons-is neither new nor novel. Moreover, neither is target state vulnerability to this unconventional brand of nonmilitary coercion, a fact that carries significant operational and policy implications.Mass Migration as a WeaponIndeed, as illustrated in detail in my 2010 book, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion and Foreign Policy, using displaced people as nonmilitary instruments of state-level coercion has long been a common feature of international politics.8 In fact, this frequently asymmetric brand of coercion-i.e., coercive engineered migration (CEM)-has been attempted at least seventy-five times since the advent of the 1951 Refugee Convention alone; that is at least one per year on average. …