Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs) - Hardcover

Greenhill, Kelly M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801448719 ISBN 13: 9780801448713

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2010

Synopsis

IR theorists, foreign policy analysts and migration, security studies, and human rights scholars will all find this book a valuable addition to their scholarship.â• Political Studies Review

At first glance, the U.S. decision to escalate the war in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, China's position on North Korea's nuclear program in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the EU resolution to lift what remained of the arms embargo against Libya in the mid-2000s would appear to share little in common. Yet each of these seemingly unconnected and far-reaching foreign policy decisions resulted at least in part from the exercise of a unique kind of coercion, one predicated on the intentional creation, manipulation, and exploitation of real or threatened mass population movements. 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. This "coercion by punishment" strategy can be effected in two ways: the first relies on straightforward threats to overwhelm a target's capacity to accommodate a refugee or migrant influx; the second, on a kind of norms-enhanced political blackmail that exploits the existence of legal and normative commitments to those fleeing violence, persecution, or privation. The theory is further illustrated and tested in a variety of case studies from Europe, East Asia, and North America.

To help potential targets better respond to-and protect themselves against-this kind of unconventional predation, Weapons of Mass Migration also offers practicable policy recommendations for scholars, government officials, and anyone concerned about the true victims of this kind of coercion—the displaced themselves.

About this title

About the Author

Kelly M. Greenhill is Associate Professor at Tufts University and Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She is author of Weapons of Mass Migration (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)--winner of the 2011 International Studies Association's Best Book of the Year Award--and co-author and co-editor of Sex, Drugs and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict (Cornell University Press) and The Use of Force: Military Power and International Politics, 8th ed. Greenhill's research has also appeared in a variety of other venues, including the journals International Security, Security Studies, Civil Wars, and International Migration, in media outlets such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, the International Herald Tribune, and the British Broadcasting Company, and in briefs prepared for the U.S. Supreme Court and other organs of the U.S. government. Greenhill is currently completing a new monograph, a cross-national, multi-method study that explores why, when, and under what conditions, contested, "extra-factual" sources of political information--such as rumors, conspiracy theories, myths and propaganda--materially influence the development and conduct of states' foreign and defense policies. Outside of academia, Greenhill serves as a consultant to agencies of the US government and to other governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801448719
• ISBN 13: 9780801448713
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360