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Forced Displacement as an Instrument of Coercion
Kelly M. Greenhill 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. 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. Coercive engineered migrations (or coercion-driven migrations) are “those cross-border population movements that are deliberately created or manipulated in order to induce political, military and/or economic concessions from a target state or states.” The instruments employed to affect this kind of coercion are myriad and diverse. They run the gamut from compulsory to permissive, from the employment of hostile threats and the use of military force (as were used during the 1967-1970 Biafran and 1992-1995 Bosnian civil wars) through the offer of positive inducements and provision of financial incentives (as were offered to North Vietnamese by the United States in 1954-1955, following the First Indochina War) to the straightforward opening of normally sealed borders (as was done by President Erich Honecker of East Germany in the early 1980s. Coercive engineered migration is frequently, but not always, undertaken in the context of population outflows strategically generated for other reasons. In fact, it represents just one subset of a broader class of events that all rely on the creation and exploitation of such crises as means to political and military ends—a phenomenon I call strategic engineered migration. Coercive engineered migration is often embedded within mass migrations strategically engineered for dispossessive, exportive, or militarized reasons. It is likely, at least in part as a consequence of its embedded and often camouflaged nature, that its prevalence has also been generally under-recognized and its significance, underappreciated. Indeed, it is a phenomenon that for many observers has been hiding in plain sight. For instance, it is widely known that in 1972 Idi Amin expelled most Asians from Uganda in what has been commonly interpreted as a naked attempt at economic asset expropriation. Far less well understood, however, is the fact that approximately 50,000 of those expelled were British passport-holders, and that these expulsions happened at the same time that Amin was trying to convince the British to halt their drawdown of military assistance to his country. In short, Amin announced his intention to foist 50,000 refugees on the British, but did so with a convenient ninety-day grace period to give the British an opportunity to rescind their decision regarding aid. And Amin was far from unique. Posted by: 746 2015-11-21 |
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