Strategic Engineered Migration as a Weapon of War

 

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the fact is the instrumental exploitation of population outflows is neither a new nor a particularly unusual phenomenon. Rather, such exploitation has had a long, influential, and often successful history, one that includes both wartime and peacetime use, by both state and non-state actors.

Furthermore, despite a widespread belief that the majority of outflows are simply the unintended consequences of man-made or natural humanitarian disasters – for example, wars, floods, famines – in reality most are created as the direct result of political decisions taken by sovereign states, often for specific political and/or military ends.1 In the last decade alone, we have witnessed their use in wartime in multiple locations and in numerous ways. They have been pressed into service as soldiers Civil (in the African Great Lakes region, for example), deployed as human shields (such as in Afghanistan and Iraq), and used to create logistical logjams (in Kosovo and Sudan, for instance). They have likewise been employed as propaganda tools to elicit international sympathy and support (including by all parties to the conflicts in Bosnia, to name just one example).

Ironically, however, while such manipulation is not particularly unusual, neither is it particularly well understood. While an appreciation of the fact that displaced people can be used tactically as ‘refugee warriors’ and ‘human shields’ has been growing in currency in recent years, this kind of tactical use is but one piece of the puzzle. Arguably, the more interesting and still underappreciated piece surrounds the strategic manipulation of flows themselves, something that can be accomplished through means as obvious as the employment of massive military force, or as subtle as the judicious use of financial inducements. In the 1990s the world witnessed orchestrated population outflows in regions as diverse and far-flung as the Balkans, the African Great Lakes Region, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia.

Still, the manipulation of population movements as operational and strategic means to political and military ends remains poorly understood2 – so much so, in fact, that the idea that this kind of manipulation even exists is sometimes resisted.3 This is an unfortunate trend, because evidence suggests that such manipulation and exploitation is growing both easier and more frequent over time, while simultaneously remaining, for reasons I shall elucidate below, something of a self-hiding phenomenon.4 This article aims to address this lack of understanding in several distinct ways.

First, it presents the first comprehensive taxonomy of the underappreciated phenomenon of strategic engineered migration.

Second, drawing upon data from this author’s own database of these strategically-driven out-migrations, it offers some observations on its general prevalence and the efficacy of one of its sub-variants; namely, the coercive variant – that is, the class of cross-border migrations designed to influence the political or economic behavior of potential host states and other state-level actors farther afield.

Finally, it presents a set of testable propositions about the nature of the actors who seek to employ this kind of unconventional weapon and an explanation as to what motivates them to resort to it, in the face of the potential reputational and retributive costs of doing so.

from the book - Strategic Engineered Migration as a Weapon of War - K. M. Greenhill