Weapons of Mass Migration

Greenhill’s latest book Weapons of Mass Migration is an innovative and beautifully written analysis of how, and to what extent, refugee flows are exploited by states in order to affect policy options and decisions taken by their counterparts. The analysis centres on the concept of coercive engineered migration or migration-driven coercion defined as ‘population movements that are deliberately created or manipulated in order to induce political, military and/or economic concessions from a target state or states’ (p. 13). The book thus investigates why and under which circumstances coercive engineered migration can prove efficacious, addressing three overarching questions: firstly, how often does coercive engineered migration happen; secondly, how often does it work; and thirdly, how and why does it ever work? Greenhill’s thesis postulates that would-be coercers can impose costs on targets through two non-mutually exclusive yet independently sufficient pathways. The first is through straightforward threats to overwhelm the physical or political capacity of a target state to accommodate an influx. The second entails ‘norms-enhanced political blackmail predicated on exploitation of the heterogeneity of interests that frequently exists within polities’ (p. 3). Hence, the author explores a ‘converse condition’ in states’ interactions whereby ‘weak actors may use norms to help compensate for their relative deficiencies when seeking to influence more powerful counterparts’ (p. 7). It is here that one of the most intriguing aspects of Greenhill’s thesis lies. Weak actors—she hypothesizes and eventually demonstrates—instrumentally violate and exploit norms in order to influence the behaviour of states that adhere to them. The coercive power of migration is fundamentally linked to the receiving states’ commitment to liberal values and their internal democratic processes. Democracy, it is argued, generates multiple weaknesses. It creates hypocrisy costs defined as ‘those symbolic political costs that can be imposed when there exists a real or perceived disparity between a professed commitment to liberal values and norms and demonstrated actions that contravene such a commitment’ (p. 4). As a special class of reputational costs, hypocrisy costs reflect moral contradictions. Greenhill thus documents the many instances whereby, after having made rhetorical and/or juridical commitments to protect those fleeing violence, democratic countries eventually decide to forcibly repatriate unwelcome foreigners. In short, ‘fears’ related to putative invasions of migrants and asylum seekers and competing domestic interests allow weak challengers to coerce their stronger interlocutors into specific actions

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