Migration as a Geopolitical Tool
Migration as a Geopolitical Tool
1. Introduction: Thinking About Migration as a Geopolitical Tool
What Does "Instrumentalized" or "Weaponized" Migration Mean?
People moving across borders always has geopolitical effects, whether they move by choice or are forced. But when we talk about migration as a geopolitical tool, we mean something specific: states or other groups deliberately manipulating these movements to gain a strategic edge—politically, militarily, or economically. It's a conscious strategy, different from the usual, unintended consequences of migration.
The term "weaponized migration" really took off thanks to Kelly Greenhill. She described it as using population movements deliberately for political and military goals. This highlights how migration can be used coercively, where the threat or reality of people moving becomes leverage against another country. These kinds of actions often happen in that grey area between peace and outright war, sometimes seen as part of hybrid warfare or influence campaigns. It's about using human movement as an unconventional weapon in the geopolitical game.
While "weaponized" implies clear hostility, the wording matters. Sometimes, especially in official language like EU laws, you'll see "instrumentalized migration" used instead. This term might cover a wider range of manipulations, even those where the coercive intent isn't as obvious or easy to pin down. Using "instrumentalization," as the EU does, could be a way to acknowledge deliberate manipulation legally and politically without escalating things as much as the word "weaponization" might. This choice of words lets targeted countries respond while keeping some flexibility about how they define the threat and react.
Who Uses It and Why?
Historically and today, it's mostly states that use migration this way. Think about the Soviet Union in the past, or more recently, Turkey, Belarus, and possibly Russia. While non-state groups could theoretically do it, state actions are the most documented and significant.
The goals vary widely. States might aim to:
Grab land or cement control over areas by moving populations in or out.
Force policy changes, get money, or gain diplomatic favor by using migration flows as a threat.
Destabilize other countries or regions by creating social, economic, or political stress.
Change the ethnic makeup of areas for strategic reasons (demographic engineering).
Gain an advantage in international talks.
Influence public opinion or elections in other countries.
Achieve military aims, like disrupting enemy logistics or clearing areas.
Greenhill's Ideas on Strategic Engineered Migration
Kelly Greenhill developed a useful way to categorize how migration is strategically engineered. She identified four types:
Dispossessive: Forcibly removing people to take their territory. Think ethnic cleansing, Stalin's deportations for territorial gain, or colonial powers removing indigenous groups.
Exportive: Moving populations to either tighten control over an area (by bringing in loyal groups) or weaken an opponent by sending refugees or migrants their way. Soviet settlement of Russians in other republics or colonial settlement programs fit here.
Militarized: Using population movement to directly hamper an enemy's military ability. This could mean clearing civilians from war zones, clogging up logistics with displaced people, or using movements to cover military actions.
Coercive: Using actual or threatened outflows of people to force an opponent to give in or change policies. This often works by playing on the target state's dislike of large, uncontrolled influxes, whether due to ethnic sensitivities, economic worries, security fears, or commitments to humanitarian norms. Many recent cases, like those involving Belarus and Turkey against the EU, fall into this category. Greenhill found over 100 such instances since 1951, showing how common this has been.
Greenhill's work, especially on coercion, highlights a key asymmetry. Coercive migration often works best against states with certain internal features – their political systems, values, laws, and humanitarian commitments. Liberal democracies, bound by human rights laws, asylum procedures (like the Refugee Convention), and public sensitivity to humanitarian issues, are especially vulnerable. The actors using these tactics, often authoritarian regimes, usually don't face the same domestic or legal constraints for creating outflows. This creates an imbalance where they can exploit the norms and laws of their targets, turning migration into a weapon against democratic states.
2. Looking Back: How States Have Engineered Population Movements
Deliberately manipulating population movements for strategic gain isn't new. History is full of examples where states engineered migrations, deportations, and settlements to achieve geopolitical goals, often with terrible human costs.
Forced Deportations in Stalin's USSR
The Soviet Union under Stalin is a stark example of state-engineered population transfers in the 20th century. Primarily from the 1930s to the early 1950s, the state security apparatus (NKVD) carried out these operations as part of wider political repression.
The reasons were complex, mixing geopolitical strategy with internal control and ideology. A major factor was perceived insecurity. Stalin's regime deeply distrusted non-Russian ethnic groups near the borders, fearing they might collaborate with enemies like Germany or Japan. Removing groups like Poles, Germans, Finns, and Latvians from western borders early on reflected this policy. Stalin's fixation on territorial security led him to create buffer zones populated by supposedly loyal groups.
Internally, these deportations helped consolidate Stalin's power by removing potential opposition and targeting entire nationalities deemed unreliable or resistant. State ideology justified sacrificing individuals for state interests. The deportations also served demographic engineering and Russification goals. Cleansed territories, especially strategic ones like Crimea and the Caucasus, were often resettled with Slavic, mainly Russian, populations to change the ethnic mix and cement Soviet control. Stalin promoted Great Russian nationalism to unify the state. Finally, there was an economic motive: providing cheap labor for resource extraction, farming, and construction in remote areas like Siberia and Central Asia under the brutal Gulag system.
The methods were systematic and brutal. Typically, targeted groups were quickly rounded up and transported inhumanely in cattle cars over long distances. Arriving in designated "special settlements," deportees found themselves in harsh environments often without basic necessities. They lost their civil rights, became "special colonists" in a quasi-prison system, and endured forced labor with little food or shelter.
The scale was enormous. Estimates suggest at least 6 million Soviet citizens were forcibly migrated internally. This includes roughly 1.8 million "kulaks" (wealthier peasants) in 1930-31, another million peasants and minorities from 1932-39, and 3.5 million ethnic minorities from 1940-52. About 1.45 million more were deported from territories annexed by the USSR between 1939-1941, including many from Poland and the Baltic states.
The human toll was devastating. Soviet archives list around 800,000 deaths during deportations and in settlements in the 1930s-40s, but historians like Nicolas Werth put the total death toll between 1 and 1.5 million. High mortality occurred during transit and early settlement due to disease, malnutrition, exposure, and exhaustion. Beyond deaths, the deportations caused deep, lasting trauma, destroyed communities, and led to long-term displacement. Some groups, like Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks, couldn't return home even after Stalin's death. These actions often involved administrative restructuring, like downgrading the Crimean Autonomous Republic, and are widely seen today as crimes against humanity and ethnic persecution, sometimes even genocide.
Stalin's deportations clearly show how internal repression can serve external geopolitical goals. Removing "unreliable" groups from borderlands and replacing them with Russian settlers wasn't just about domestic control; it was a calculated strategy to create secure, loyal buffer zones. This demographic reshaping was tied to Stalin's expansionist foreign policy, like establishing a Soviet sphere in Eastern Europe. Internal population engineering was a tool, perhaps even a necessity, for these broader geopolitical aims.
The legacy of these forced displacements still shapes the region. The deportations and denial of return created lasting historical grievances. Resettling Russians and others into emptied lands changed ethnic compositions, fueling later tensions and separatist movements after the Soviet collapse. This demonstrates how state-engineered demographic shifts, meant to solve immediate security issues, can plant seeds for long-term instability and conflict, affecting geopolitics decades later.
Population Exchanges as Geopolitical Tools
After major conflicts like WWI, population exchange became a state-approved method to deal with ethnic tensions and solidify new or redefined nation-states. Based on a coercive application of national self-determination to minorities, these exchanges aimed for ethnically uniform populations within new borders. Though sometimes framed as voluntary, the reality was often forced displacement, especially for the less powerful group. Until around WWII, some political figures saw such transfers as a drastic but possibly necessary way to achieve stability.
The Greco-Turkish Exchange (1923): This is probably the best-known compulsory, internationally approved population exchange.
It was formalized by the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations (Lausanne, 1923) as part of the peace treaty ending the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), following the Ottoman Empire's collapse and the rise of nationalist Turkey. It's seen as the first compulsory exchange ratified internationally (under League of Nations auspices).
The main driver was the desire of both Greece and the new Turkish Republic to create ethnically and religiously pure nation-states, removing minorities seen as potentially disloyal or sources of future conflict. It aimed to finalize the Treaty of Lausanne's territorial settlement and stabilize relations after a brutal war, which included systematic killings of Ottoman Greeks. Some argue the exchange, despite its brutality, might have prevented further massacres against the remaining Orthodox Christians in Turkey.
The exchange was compulsory, based mainly on religion, not language or self-identity. It involved moving about 1.3 million Orthodox Christians (mostly Greek-speaking, but some Turkish-speaking) from Turkey to Greece, and around 354,000 Muslims from Greece to Turkey. This massive forced uprooting drastically changed both countries' demographics.
The results were immense and lasting. Greece faced a huge humanitarian crisis with over 1.2 million destitute refugees, straining its economy, housing, health systems, and society. Areas like Greek Macedonia were ethnically transformed. Integrating the newcomers was long and hard, marked by tensions with locals, especially over redistributed former Muslim properties. While the exchange did help stabilize Greek-Turkish relations in the 1930s under Venizelos and Atatürk, it left deep scars of trauma and loss for the displaced and set a controversial precedent for solving ethnic conflict through forced denaturalization and expulsion. By today's international law, such compulsory transfers violate fundamental human rights.
The Partition of India (1947): The division of British India into India and Pakistan is another enormous example of population movement linked to geopolitical change.
Partition was based on the "two-nation theory" proposing separate homelands for Hindus and Muslims. The borders, especially the Radcliffe Line dividing Punjab and Bengal, were drawn quickly in mid-1947 by a British lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who knew little about India and had only five weeks. Decades of British "divide and rule" policies had worsened existing communal tensions.
Religious nationalism, particularly the Muslim League's push for Pakistan, was the main driver. The British, wanting a fast power transfer, agreed to partition. While leaders didn't initially plan for large-scale population moves, the announcement and border drawing sparked widespread fear and violence, leading to spontaneous mass migrations across the Radcliffe Line.
The outcome was one of history's largest and most violent mass migrations. Estimates suggest 14-16 million people were displaced – Hindus and Sikhs to India, Muslims to Pakistan. The division of Punjab was especially horrific, with massacres and riots, sometimes called retributive genocide. Deaths are estimated from several hundred thousand up to two million.
The consequences were catastrophic and enduring. A huge humanitarian crisis erupted, with millions becoming refugees facing starvation, disease, and homelessness. Partition created deep hostility between India and Pakistan, leading to lasting conflict, wars, and disputes like Kashmir. It caused major demographic shifts and left a traumatic mark on the subcontinent's collective memory.
The Greco-Turkish exchange shows a historical moment where compulsory population transfer, based on group identity, was institutionalized by international agreement to achieve geopolitical aims like national homogeneity and stability. This contrasts sharply with current international law forbidding such forced movements. The Lausanne model reveals how norms around sovereignty, minority rights, and the legitimacy of using populations as state tools have changed. While it arguably prevented more immediate violence, its human cost set a precedent now widely rejected.
India's Partition highlights how flawed geopolitical decision-making can worsen the human cost of population movements. The rushed drawing of the Radcliffe Line, based on poor information and religious majorities ignoring local complexities, combined with the quick British withdrawal timeline, created chaos and uncertainty. This directly fueled the scale and brutality of the violence and displacement. It proves that how geopolitical migration strategies are implemented matters critically; failures in planning can turn political solutions into humanitarian disasters with lasting negative geopolitical effects.
Colonial Settlement and Demographic Engineering
European colonialism is another key historical context for migration instrumentalization. Colonial powers often used population movements – settling their own people and displacing indigenous groups – as basic tools to establish control, extract resources, and remake territories.
Settler colonialism specifically aimed to replace indigenous populations with settlers from the colonizing power. It wasn't just about resources; it was about building permanent political, social, and economic structures linked to the home country. This usually meant systematically dispossessing and displacing native communities to make way for settlers, farms, or resource extraction. Racist ideologies justified this displacement and marginalization. Even outside European colonialism, examples like Ottoman resettlement practices to secure borders or populate conquered cities show the long history of using population transfers for governance.
While the source material doesn't detail French policies in Algeria or British ones in Palestine, the concept of settler colonialism and Ottoman precedents illustrate the principle. Colonial settlement policies represent long-term, systemic migration instrumentalization. They fit Greenhill's 'dispossessive' and 'exportive' types, aiming not just for temporary gain but for permanently transforming a territory's demography, economy, and politics in favor of the colonizer through sustained, state-backed migration and displacement. This shows migration's role not just in interstate conflict but also as a core element in building and maintaining empires and the conflicts often resulting from them.
3. How It Looks Today: Migration in Modern Geopolitics
Large-scale forced deportations and exchanges are rarer now due to changed international norms, but using migration for strategic gain continues in adapted forms. Today's geopolitics sees states leveraging migration flows, often exploiting existing weaknesses and legal systems.
Instrumentalization at EU Borders: The Belarus Case (2021-Ongoing)
A striking recent example is Belarus allegedly orchestrating migration towards the EU's eastern border. Starting mid-2021, the Lukashenka regime was accused by the EU and affected countries (mainly Poland, Lithuania, Latvia) of helping thousands of migrants, mostly from the Middle East and Africa, travel to Belarus and then pushing them towards the EU border.
The generally accepted reason was retaliation for EU sanctions imposed after the disputed 2020 Belarusian election and subsequent crackdown. The goal seemed to be pressuring the EU to lift sanctions, divide member states, and perhaps get other concessions. Lukashenka had previously threatened to weaponize migration this way. Reports suggest Belarus eased visas, arranged flights to Minsk, transported migrants to border areas, gave them tools to break fences, and stopped them from turning back, creating a humanitarian crisis in the border forests and swamps. This tactic deliberately exploited the EU's legal duties on asylum and human rights, a kind of "lawfare" designed to corner the target states.
The targeted EU states responded by declaring emergencies, sending troops, building fences, and pushing migrants back across the border. These actions raised serious questions about compliance with international and EU law, especially non-refoulement and asylum access rights. The EU officially called it a "hybrid attack" involving migrant "instrumentalisation" by Belarus. While Belarus didn't achieve major concessions, the crisis caused significant EU-Belarus tension, immense suffering for migrants trapped at the border, and revealed the EU's vulnerability to coercive migration tactics.
The Belarus case shows how performative modern migration instrumentalization can be. The number of migrants wasn't huge compared to 2015-16. Yet, the strategy seemed focused on creating a visible, dramatic crisis at the EU's edge. By staging a humanitarian spectacle, getting intense media attention, and forcing EU states into legally dubious responses like pushbacks, Lukashenka likely aimed to expose supposed EU hypocrisy on human rights, stir political friction within and between member states, and tarnish the EU's image. It was political warfare using human vulnerability for maximum public and political impact.
Migration Diplomacy and Leverage: The EU-Turkey Deal (2016-Ongoing)
The EU-Turkey relationship over migration is a complex mix of diplomacy, leverage, and instrumentalization. After over a million asylum seekers and migrants reached the EU in 2015-16, many via Turkey, the two sides struck the EU-Turkey Statement in March 2016. Turkey, hosting the world's largest refugee population (mainly ~3.6 million Syrians), is in a critical position.
The deal's core had Turkey boosting border controls to stop irregular departures to Greek islands and agreeing to take back "all new irregular migrants" arriving in Greece after March 20, 2016. A largely unused "one-for-one" part stated that for every Syrian returned from Greece, another Syrian from Turkey would be resettled in the EU. In return, the EU promised significant money (€3bn initially, €3bn later via the Facility for Refugees in Turkey), faster visa liberalization for Turks (which stalled), and renewed Turkish EU accession talks (which also stalled).
The EU mainly wanted to cut irregular arrivals dramatically, regain border control, and ease the political crisis from the 2015-16 influx. Turkey sought money to manage refugees, political concessions (especially visas and accession), and greater geopolitical clout from its gatekeeper role.
The deal did significantly reduce irregular Aegean crossings. But the relationship remains tense. Turkey's government under Erdoğan has repeatedly accused the EU of breaking promises (especially on visas and funds) and has threatened to "open the gates" as leverage. This threat was briefly carried out in Feb-Mar 2020 when Turkey encouraged migrants towards the Greek border after military losses in Syria. This reflects "refugee commodification," where refugees' presence and potential movement become bargaining chips. While the deal shows Turkey's importance as a buffer for EU migration management, it also created complex domestic politics in Turkey, like potential aid dependency and public debate on refugees. The deal faces criticism for letting the EU outsource protection duties and potentially compromising human rights for migration control.
The EU-Turkey deal highlights the deep link between international migration diplomacy and domestic politics. For Turkey's ruling AKP, managing refugees brought international leverage but also domestic economic and social pressures, influencing politics, including opposition stances. Similarly, the EU's willingness to make the deal was driven by domestic political demands in member states for less migration. Yet, concessions to Turkey, like visa liberalization and accession talks, were politically sensitive within both the EU and Turkey. This shows migration instrumentalization strategies operate where foreign policy meets internal political calculations on all sides.
Furthermore, the EU-Turkey Statement, despite its issues, might signal a broader trend towards transactional approaches in migration management. By explicitly linking money and political perks to migration control, the EU risks reinforcing the idea that migration control is a service transit countries can sell. This could unintentionally encourage other states to see migration flows as a commodity for geopolitical or economic gain, echoing past tactics like Gaddafi's. Such normalization could undermine principled, rights-based approaches to asylum and refugee protection under international law.
Refugee Flows in Conflict: The War in Ukraine (2022-Ongoing)
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 set off Europe's largest and fastest refugee crisis since WWII. Millions of Ukrainians, mostly women and children, fled their homes. As of early 2025, UNHCR reported about 6.9 million Ukrainian refugees globally and 3.7 million internally displaced people (IDPs). Widespread destruction of homes and infrastructure created huge ongoing humanitarian needs.
While displacement is mainly a direct result of Russia's aggression, the sheer size of the refugee flows has significant geopolitical impact. Neighboring countries like Poland, Romania, Moldova, Hungary, and Slovakia faced immense strain on their reception systems. The EU's response, especially activating the Temporary Protection Directive for immediate support to Ukrainians, was notably swift and unified compared to 2015-16.
Beyond being a consequence, some analysis suggests generating massive refugee flows might be partly intentional in Russia's strategy—a form of weaponization. Deliberate Russian tactics, like targeting civilian infrastructure (energy, housing, hospitals) and making occupied areas unlivable, inevitably force displacement. Some argue this serves secondary goals: destabilizing Ukraine internally, overwhelming neighbors' and the EU's support systems, diverting resources from military to humanitarian aid, and possibly fueling political dissent or "refugee fatigue" in host countries. This fits Greenhill's 'exportive' or 'coercive' types and echoes past allegations about Russian actions in Syria potentially aimed at worsening refugee flows to Europe. Here, displacement itself acts as a tool of war, aimed at attrition and destabilization.
The Ukraine situation shows how migration can be weaponized indirectly, as a predictable and possibly desired result of military actions. Even if not used explicitly as a diplomatic bargaining chip like in the Belarus or Turkey cases, strategically causing mass displacement through attacks on civilians and infrastructure can be a powerful tool. It aims to weaken the target state's resilience, impose heavy costs on its allies, and shape the conflict's broader geopolitical landscape. This highlights how inducing displacement can be part of a hybrid warfare strategy, blurring lines between military action and its non-military effects.
Other Cases and Emerging Trends
Beyond these prominent examples, other situations suggest migration instrumentalization remains relevant:
Russia and Syria (2015-16): US military officials and analysts accused Russia and Assad of deliberately weaponizing migration from Syria, especially via indiscriminate bombing, to overwhelm Europe and break its resolve. While direct proof of intent specifically targeting the EU is debated, and displacement primarily served tactical goals within Syria, Russia clearly exploited the resulting crisis with propaganda to deepen political divisions in the EU.
Libya under Gaddafi: Before his 2011 overthrow, Gaddafi repeatedly threatened to send waves of sub-Saharan migrants to Europe unless the EU paid up and lifted sanctions. He explicitly framed migration control as a service Europe should pay for, successfully extorting funds sometimes.
Morocco and Spain: Sudden surges of migrants trying to enter Spanish enclaves Ceuta and Melilla have been seen by some as Morocco using migration as political leverage in disputes with Spain and the EU.
An emerging trend seems to be the growing use of migration as a tool in "grey zone" conflicts—actions short of conventional war but aimed at coercion, destabilization, or strategic gain. Authoritarian states might find this an appealing asymmetric tactic against powerful democracies whose legal and humanitarian commitments can be exploited. Globalization, increased mobility, and the high political profile of migration in many developed nations create fertile ground for these strategies.
4. How It Works: Tactics of Weaponized Migration
Those seeking to instrumentalize migration use various tactics, from subtle to direct, to reach their goals.
Coercive Engineered Migration: This is Greenhill's classic definition. It means deliberately creating, or threatening, migration crises to force political, military, or economic concessions. It works if the target feels vulnerable to or strongly dislikes uncontrolled population inflows. This aversion might come from potential economic costs, social service strain, political sensitivity (fear of nationalist backlash), or the target's commitment to humanitarian and legal norms that the coercer exploits. Gaddafi's demands on the EU, Turkey leveraging the EU deal, and the Belarus border crisis are examples.
Facilitation, Obstruction, and Channeling: Manipulating flows often involves direct meddling with people's movement.
This can mean actively helping travel to a target's border, like easing visas or arranging transport (as alleged in Belarus).
Conversely, actors might block movement away from a border or prevent returns, trapping migrants to keep pressure on the target (also alleged against Belarus).
Channeling means selectively opening/closing border points or routes to control flow volume and direction, using this control as a diplomatic tool (like Turkey briefly opening its Greek border in 2020). Military actions foreseeably worsening flows, like indiscriminate bombing, can also be seen as indirect facilitation.
Demographic Pressure and Destabilization: Beyond specific demands, migration can be used broadly to create demographic pressure and destabilize a target. This involves generating or directing large flows to overwhelm social services, infrastructure, and political systems. The influx can be exploited (often with disinformation) to sow social division, fuel anti-immigrant feelings, empower extremists, and generally weaken the target's political stability and social cohesion. Historical examples include state-sponsored settlements changing ethnic balances, like Stalin's resettlement of Russians.
Lawfare and Exploiting Legal Norms: A particularly nasty tactic is weaponizing the target's own legal and moral commitments—a type of "lawfare". This exploits the fact that many targets, especially liberal democracies, are bound by laws on asylum, human rights, and non-refoulement. By creating situations where many migrants seek protection at the border, the orchestrator puts the target in a bind: uphold legal/moral duties (risking costs and political backlash) or violate them with measures like pushbacks (risking legal challenges, condemnation, and reputational damage). This deliberately turns the target's adherence to law and humanitarianism into a weakness. Forcing targets into legally questionable actions can help the orchestrator paint them as hypocritical or inhumane.
Using lawfare in these situations doesn't just create temporary political problems; it actively erodes international protection norms. When states feel forced by manufactured crises into measures like pushbacks or shortcuts on asylum procedures, these exceptions risk becoming normal. This normalization sets dangerous precedents that weaken the international refugee protection system, especially non-refoulement. Ultimately, this benefits actors wanting to undermine the liberal international order and its laws, potentially leading to lower protection standards worldwide. The tactic's corrosive effect goes far beyond the immediate border crisis.
5. The Fallout: Wide-Ranging Impacts
Using migration as a geopolitical weapon affects everyone involved: the migrants themselves, the countries involved (origin, transit, destination), and the wider international scene.
For Migrants and Refugees: People caught in these flows often suffer the most. They're treated as pawns or "living warheads," not humans with rights. This often exposes them to greater danger, exploitation, severe hardship during travel or while stranded, and even death. Vulnerable groups like women, children, the elderly, and minorities face higher risks, including violence and trafficking.
Their basic rights are frequently violated. They might be denied fair asylum processes, illegally pushed back across borders, detained in poor conditions, and deprived of essentials like food, water, shelter, and medical help. Besides immediate dangers, the experience causes long-term psychological trauma, prolonged displacement, and deep uncertainty about their future.
For Origin, Transit, and Destination States: The effects differ based on a state's role:
Origin Countries: Can suffer from brain drain, loss of productive people, and the instability that often drives emigration.
Transit Countries: Face strained resources, border management issues, and potential social tensions. However, like Turkey, they can also leverage their position for diplomatic influence or financial aid, sometimes leading to complex aid dependency.
Destination Countries: Often see significant domestic political division, fueling anti-immigrant sentiment and empowering nationalist/populist forces. Instrumentalized migration strains welfare systems, housing, infrastructure, and integration efforts. Security concerns, real or amplified, become prominent. These countries bear substantial costs for border enforcement, asylum processing, and reception. These pressures can heavily influence laws and election results.
For International Relations and Regional Stability: Instrumentalizing migration sends ripples through the international system. It often increases interstate tensions and mistrust, as seen between the EU and Belarus/Turkey, or historically India and Pakistan.
By deliberately creating humanitarian crises and political friction, weaponized migration can destabilize regions. It challenges international cooperation on migration and refugee protection, often undermining burden-sharing efforts. It can also shift geopolitical alignments, potentially boosting the influence of states controlling migration flows (like Turkey's role with Syrian refugees). As a hybrid warfare tactic, it blurs lines between peace and conflict, complicating traditional security thinking.
A key dynamic is the feedback loop between instrumentalization and securitization. When states feel migration is used against them, they tend to respond with more security measures: tougher borders, more surveillance, restrictive asylum policies, sometimes pushbacks. While defensive, this can further endanger migrants and inadvertently help the instigator by creating harsh images for propaganda or making diplomacy harder. This security focus risks framing migration mainly as a threat, overshadowing humanitarian concerns and hindering better, cooperative solutions. This cycle—instrumentalization breeding securitization which hardens stances—can make future instrumentalization seem more plausible.
6. International Law Under Strain
Deliberately manipulating migration flows challenges the international legal frameworks meant to protect refugees and human rights. These systems, mostly built post-WWII, rest on principles directly attacked by instrumentalization tactics.
The Refugee Convention (1951) and Protection Principles: This convention and its 1967 Protocol are the foundation of international refugee law. They define refugees and outline states' duties towards them, including non-discrimination, access to justice/services, and crucially, protection from forcible return (non-refoulement). Instrumentalization clashes fundamentally with the Convention's spirit. It treats people not as individuals needing protection assessment, but as a mass to be moved or stopped for strategic gain. Practical issues also arise, like states applying geographic limits to the Convention (e.g., Turkey), complicating things for non-European refugees.
Human Rights Law and Non-Refoulement: Beyond refugee law, broader human rights law guarantees basic rights to everyone in a state's territory, regardless of migration status. Regional laws like the European Convention on Human Rights reinforce this. Key is non-refoulement: prohibiting return to places where someone faces real risk of persecution, torture, or inhuman treatment. This is a customary international law norm applying universally, even beyond formal refugees. Responses to perceived weaponized migration, like summary pushbacks or denying access to asylum claims, often directly violate non-refoulement and related procedures.
How Instrumentalization Challenges Legal Systems: It creates deep problems for the legal structure:
Target State Dilemmas: Puts states bound by international law in a tough spot between legal/humanitarian duties and intense political/security pressure to control borders coercively.
Normalizing Exceptions: States might declare emergencies or pass laws restricting rights. There's a real risk these crisis measures become permanent, lowering protection standards over time.
Exploiting Norms (Lawfare): The very existence of strong legal/humanitarian norms in target states becomes a vulnerability exploited by the instigator. The tactic relies on the target's commitment to these norms to create pressure.
Accountability Gaps: Figuring out legal responsibility is hard. Who's accountable? The orchestrating state? The target state whose response might violate international law?
Undermining Cooperation: Instrumentalization erodes trust and undermines the international cooperation needed for effective, humane migration management and refugee protection.
Facing this threat, target states and bodies like the EU aren't just using ad-hoc illegal measures; they're creating new legal concepts. Formally putting terms like "instrumentalisation of migration" into EU legal proposals, with provisions for emergency border procedures potentially limiting asylum rights, shows this trend. While framed as necessary adaptations to hybrid threats, this legal 're-engineering' risks embedding more restrictive practices. It could permanently shift the post-WWII balance between state security and individual rights, potentially causing a major step back from standards set by frameworks like the Refugee Convention.
7. Bringing It Together: Migration as a Lasting Geopolitical Force
Looking at history and current events, it's clear that controlling and manipulating population movements has always been part of statecraft and geopolitical rivalry. Methods change, but using migration as a power tool persists.
Historical Trends and Evolving Tactics:
A consistent pattern exists: states have always tried to manage, direct, block, or cause population movements for strategic benefit. This goes from ancient empires resettling people to modern states using mass deportations, exchanges, or colonial settlements.
But strategies have shifted. The overt, large-scale forced transfers aimed at ethnic homogeneity or territorial control (like under Stalin or post-conflict exchanges) are less common now, partly due to changing international norms and laws.
Today's tactics often seem subtler, focusing on coercion by manipulating existing or facilitated flows, leveraging laws, and using media narratives for political gain (like the Belarus and Turkey-EU cases).
Despite changes, the core goal often remains: exert pressure, gain leverage, destabilize opponents, or change political realities through managing human movement. Modern instances are often part of broader hybrid strategies, mixing migration manipulation with disinformation and potentially cyber actions, operating in the fuzzy "grey zone" between peace and war.
Comparative Overview of Cases: Instead of a table, here's a list comparing key aspects of the discussed cases:
Stalin's Deportations (1930s-1950s):
Actor: USSR (NKVD).
Motivations: Geopolitical security (borders, buffer zones), political control, Russification, economic exploitation.
Tactics: Forced deportation, ethnic cleansing, special settlements, forced labor.
Movement: Forced; ~6 million+ internally displaced.
Impacts: Catastrophic human cost (millions dead/displaced), demographic transformation, long-term ethnic grievances, consolidation of power.
Legal Dimension: Violation of human rights, crimes against humanity, ethnic persecution/genocide.
Greco-Turkish Exchange (1923):
Actors: Greece, Turkey, League of Nations.
Motivations: National homogeneity, resolve post-war minority issues, stabilize borders/relations, prevent future conflict.
Tactics: Compulsory exchange based on religion, treaty-sanctioned.
Movement: Forced; ~1.65 million total.
Impacts: Massive refugee crisis (Greece), demographic transformation, trauma, stabilized relations (short/medium term), set controversial precedent.
Legal Dimension: Legally sanctioned by international treaty (Lausanne), but coercive and rights-violating by modern standards.
Partition of India (1947):
Actors: UK, India, Pakistan.
Motivations: Religious nationalism, decolonization (hasty), attempt to resolve communal tensions (failed).
Tactics: Hasty border demarcation (Radcliffe Line), mass migration driven by fear/violence.
Movement: Largely spontaneous/fear-driven; 14-16 million displaced.
Impacts: Unprecedented violence/death toll (up to 2M), massive humanitarian crisis, enduring India-Pakistan conflict (Kashmir), deep communal divides.
Legal Dimension: Failure of governance during power transfer, borders drawn with inadequate process leading to chaos.
Belarus-EU Border Crisis (2021-Present):
Actor: Belarus.
Motivations: Retaliation for EU sanctions, political coercion (lift sanctions, gain recognition), destabilization of EU.
Tactics: Facilitation (visas, flights), transport to border, obstruction of return, lawfare.
Movement: Facilitated/Coerced; Thousands.
Impacts: Humanitarian crisis at border, political tensions (EU-Belarus), EU border securitization, limited concessions gained by Belarus.
Legal Dimension: Exploitation of EU asylum/human rights law, led to pushbacks/derogations violating non-refoulement in target states.
EU-Turkey Deal / Leverage (2016-Present):
Actors: Turkey, EU.
Motivations: EU: Reduce irregular migration, border control. Turkey: Financial aid, political concessions (visa, accession), leverage.
Tactics: Migration control agreement, coercive threats ("open gates"), refugee commodification.
Movement: Managed/Leveraged; Millions hosted by Turkey.
Impacts: Reduced Aegean crossings, ongoing political friction, Turkey gains leverage, EU externalizes responsibility, human rights concerns for refugees.
Legal Dimension: Transactional agreement raising questions about compliance with Refugee Convention principles, stalled political elements.
War in Ukraine (Displacement) (2022-Present):
Actor (Alleged Tactic): Russia.
Motivations: Primary: Military conquest. Secondary (alleged): Destabilize Ukraine/EU, overwhelm support systems, pressure allies.
Tactics: Indirect: Generating flows via attacks on civilians/infrastructure.
Movement: Forced; ~6.9M refugees, ~3.7M IDPs.
Impacts: Europe's largest refugee crisis since WWII, massive humanitarian need, strain on neighboring countries, unified EU response (Temp. Protection).
Legal Dimension: Displacement as consequence of aggression violating IHL; potential indirect weaponization exploiting humanitarian impact.
Why It Matters Now and Going Forward: Migration instrumentalization isn't history; it's a major, likely permanent, feature of 21st-century geopolitics. Why?
Ongoing global instability, conflict, and inequality create large migration flows ripe for manipulation.
Increased global connection makes movement easier but also makes societies more aware of and sensitive to migration.
Asymmetric or hybrid tactics seem effective against powerful states, making them attractive to some actors.
Migration is highly politicized and polarizing in many target countries, creating vulnerabilities to exploit.
This practice deeply challenges international norms (especially refugee protection and human rights) and the laws upholding them. It forces tough ethical and policy choices on targeted states and organizations, requiring responses that balance security with fundamental legal duties and humanitarian principles.
Final Thoughts: This look at migration as a geopolitical tool shows its deep roots—from state-sponsored deportations and exchanges to colonial policies—and its modern forms in coercive diplomacy, hybrid war, and conflict. States and others deliberately manipulate population movements for strategic goals like territory, political pressure, destabilization, or diplomatic leverage.
While tactics evolved from brute force to subtler manipulation of flows and laws, the basic idea of using human mobility as a power instrument remains. The effects are severe: immense suffering for individuals, strain on state resources and politics, and friction in international relations. The practice hits at the core of international refugee and human rights law, creating hard dilemmas and risking lower protection standards globally.
The rise and sophistication of migration instrumentalization, especially in asymmetric or "grey zone" conflicts, likely reflects broader shifts in global power and the contested nature of today's international order. Actors challenging the system or seeking an edge against stronger states might see exploiting migration flows—especially targeting liberal democracies' legal and moral commitments—as a low-cost, high-impact strategy.
