Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 37
MIGRATION AS A WEAPON
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430385/
cuban-refugee-crisis-fabricated-win-sanctions-repeal.
25. For an examination of an analogous phenomenon in the
nuclear arena, see Scott Snyder, Negotiating on the Edge: North
Korean Ne gotiating Behavior (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of
Peace, 1999), especially chap. 3.
26. Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 196.
27. Mark Habeeb, Power and Tactics in International Negotiation: How Weak Nations Bargain with Strong Nations (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
28. Ibid.; Snyder, Negotiating on the Edge, 43, 71.
29. Christopher Mitchell, “Implications,” in Western Hemisphere Immigration and United States Foreign Policy, ed. Christopher Mitchell (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1992).
30. This can be particularly important because powerful
actors tend to dismiss weaker actors’ threats for two distinct
reasons. First, they frequently have trouble believing their
weaker counterparts would initiate crises or conflicts they seem
destined to lose, based on relative capabilities. This tendency
may be further exacerbated by the fact that targets may also underestimate the magnitude of the threats facing weak challengers when the issues at stake seem trivial to them, thus leading
them to further discount the probability of crisis initiation.
Second, because the majority of targets would not themselves
initiate migration crises, they tend to dismiss threats to do so as
“irrational” or “crazy” and, consequently, also incredible.
31. Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman, The Dynamics of
Coercion (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002).
32. Valur Ingimundarson, “Cold War Misperceptions: The
Communist and Western Responses to the East German Refugee
Crisis in 1953,” Journal of Contemporary History 29 (1994):
463–81; D. G. Pruitt, Negotiating Behavior (New York, Academic
Press, 1981).
33. Indeed, targets who engage in foreign-imposed regime
change often inadvertently create conditions even more conducive to the employment of CEM after they have intervened to
change the incumbent regime, as U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya in recent years makes clear.
34. Ibid., 6–7.
35. John Mueller, “The Banality of Ethnic War,” International
Security 25, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 42–70. The use of regular
troops is often not even necessary to effect population displacement; it can also be done with paramilitary “shock troops” and
even bands of thugs, as the 1990s wars of imperial dissolution in
the Balkans demonstrate.
36. James Gow, “Coercive Cadences: The Yugoslav War of
Dissolution,” in Freedman, Strategic Coercion, chap. 11.
37. Michael W. Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (1986): 1151–69; Bruce
Russett, “Why Democratic Peace?” in Debating the Democratic
Peace, ed. Michael Brown (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996),
93.
38. DOS Telegram No. 87, Control No. 15686, and “(Secret)
Memo ‘Discontent in East Germany.’”
39. “Iran Threatens to Expel Afghan Refugees if Kabul
Ratifies U.S. Strategic Partnership,” Telegraph, 12 May 2012,
accessed 4 October 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
worldnews/asia/afghanistan/9256602/Iran-threatens-to-expel-Afghan-refugees-if-Kabul-ratifies-US-strategic-partnership.
MILITARY REVIEW November-December 2016
html. Fazel Hadi Muslimyar, speaker of the Afghan Senate,
reported that the Iranian ambassador to Afghanistan threatened
to expel Afghans if Kabul signed the partnership treaty with the
United States.
40. Greenhill, Weapons of Mass Migration; for post-publication cases and data, see Greenhill, “When Virtues Become
Vulnerabilities: The Achilles’ Heel of Migration Social Policy,”
in Handbook of Migration and Social Policy, eds. Gary Freeman
and Nikola Mirilovic (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2016);
Kelly M. Greenhill, “Demographic Bombing: People as Weapons in Syria and Beyond,” Foreign Affairs online, 17 December
2015, accessed 6 October 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/
articles/2015-12-17/demographic-bombing.
41. Greenhill, “When Virtues Become Vices.”
42. Paul K. Huth, “Deterrence and International Conflict:
Empirical Findings and Theoretical Debates,” Annual Review of
Political Science 2 (1999): 25–48; Gary Clyde Hufbauer et al.,
Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC:
Peterson Institute, 2008).
43. It is of course also possible that if general deterrence
succeeds and nothing happens, there still may be a large number of as yet unidentified cases of CEM-driven deterrence. It is
well known, for instance, that Chinese fears of both the direct
and indirect anticipated costs and potentially destabilizing
effects of a mass migration of North Koreans into China has long
deterred the Chinese from exerting greater pressure on the
Hermit Kingdom on a variety of military and nonmilitary fronts,
including its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs and
its occasional regional acts of aggression. How many other such
cases might invisibly exist (or have existed previously) is an open
question.
44. Greenhill, “Migration as a Coercive Weapon.”
45. While just such an outcome will be a good thing if the
challenger is, for instance, a nongovernmental organization
trying to bring down a dictatorship, it is a highly undesirable
outcome in most cases.
46. “The Construction of the Berlin Wall,” Berlin website,
accessed 4 October 2016, www.berlin.de/mauer/en/history/
construction-of-the-berlin-wall.
47. Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1966), 89.
48. Ronald B. Frankum Jr., Operation Passage to Freedom: The
United States Navy in Vietnam, 1954-1955 (Lubbock, TX: Texas
Tech University Press, 2007), 207.
49. Ibid. However, attempting to “pass the buck” can also
backfire by inadvertently permitting further—and more successful—coercion by enterprising opportunists.
50. H. Richard Friman, “Side-Payments Versus Security
Cards: Domestic Bargaining Tactics in International Economic
Negotiations,” International Organization 47, no. 3 (1993):
387–409.
51. Of course, the converse is also true, should coercers
aim to galvanize action within the pro-camp. That said, most
research suggests that changing the prev ailing frame in policy
debates is a difficult task.
52. Adrian Edwards, “Global Forced Displacement Hits
Record High,” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
website, 20 June 2016, accessed 4 October 2016, http://www.
unhcr.org/news/latest/2016/6/5763b65a4/global-forced-displacement-hits-record-high.html.
53. Greenhill, Weapons of Mass Migration, appendix.
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