Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement as an Instrument of Coercion

Coercion is generally understood to refer to the practice of inducing or preventing changes in political behavior through the use of threats, intimidation, or some other form of pressure—most commonly, military force. This article focuses on a very particular nonmilitary method of applying coercive pressure—the use of migration and refugee crises as instruments of persuasion. Conventional wisdom suggests this kind of coercion is rare at best.[2] Traditional international relations theory avers that it should rarely succeed. In fact, given the asymmetry in capabilities that tends to exist between would be coercers and their generally more powerful targets, it should rarely even be attempted.[3] However, as this article demonstrates, not only is this kind of coercion attempted far more frequently than the accepted wisdom would suggest but that it also tends to succeed far more often than capabilities-based theories would predict. The article is organized as follows: I begin by outlining the logic behind the coercive use of purposefully created migration and refugee crises and discuss its relative—if under-recognized— prevalence.[4] In the second section, I briefly describe the kind of actors who resort to the use of this unconventional weapon as well as highlight the diverse array of objectives sought by those who employ it. I also show that this kind of coercion has proven relatively successful, at least a