Kelly Greenhill, an Associate Professor at Tufts University and a Research Fellow with the Belfer Center’s International Security Project, talks with Aroop Mukharji (@aroopmukharji) about refugees, building walls, R2P, and weapons of mass migration.

Kelly Greenhill, an Associate Professor at Tufts University and a Research Fellow with the Belfer Center’s International Security Project, talks with Aroop Mukharji (@aroopmukharji) about refugees, building walls, R2P, and weapons of mass migration.

"In 2015, over one million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe, laying bare the limitations of the EU's common border control and burden-sharing systems. This article examines consequences of the EU's disjoint, schizophrenic and, at times, hypocritical responses to what has become known as the European migration crisis."

"Using migration as an instrument of state-level coercion is nothing new. Since the 1951 Refugee Convention came into force, there have been at least 75 attempts by state and nonstate actors to use displaced people as means to political, military, and economic ends. Coercers' demands have ranged from the simple provision of financial aid to requests for full-scale invasion and assistance in effecting regime change."

"...[T]ightening migration policies would do nothing to address the fundamental underlying causes of terrorist attacks: namely, the appeal of radicalization to a small, but committed, segment of the marginalized and disaffected already living within the European Union, many of whom are citizens. While tragically misguided, participation in such attacks can give psychologically disenfranchised individuals a sense of power and belonging. However effective and proactive law enforcement and counterterrorism units may be, until the sources of alienation and discontent are vanquished, more homegrown terrorists are likely to emerge."

"...[W]e should consider divorcing the significance of an issue from its reported or purported size. Instead, we could use alternative criteria to judge the merits of how to deal with conflict, such as applying collective values and societal norms. A focus on deterring mass atrocities, for instance, might be a better use of limited resources than either waiting for a death toll to escalate in order to justify intervention, or artificially inflating numbers to justify taking actions actually driven by other, more strategically-oriented rationales."

Determining what is "old" and "new" about conflicts demands attention to how we know what we know. Despite increasing demands for conflict data, as Kelly Greenhill argues in this post, "accurately assessing the human costs of conflict can be difficult at best."

"In 2006, and again in 2008, Qaddafi extracted from the E.U. additional financial aid and equipment (such as boats) that could be used for migration enforcement. In late 2010, the E.U. and Libya concluded a further £500 million accord, which succeeded in stopping, or at least demonstrably slowing, the flow of people across the Mediterranean — until the outbreak of unrest in Tunisia."

In Weapons of Mass Migration, Kelly M. Greenhill offers the first systematic examination of this widely deployed but largely unrecognized instrument of state influence. She shows both how often this unorthodox brand of coercion has been attempted (more than fifty times in the last half century) and how successful it has been (well over half the time). She also tackles the questions of who employs this policy tool, to what ends, and how and why it ever works. Coercers aim to affect target states' behavior by exploiting the existence of competing political interests and groups, Greenhill argues, and by manipulating the costs or risks imposed on target state populations.

In recent years, it has been widely argued that a new and different armament — i.e., the refugee as weapon — has entered the world's arsenals. But just how new and different is this weapon? Can it only be used in wartime? And just how successful has been its exploitation?