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.
InWeapons 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 Migrationalso offers practicable policy recommendations for scholars, government officials, and anyone concerned about the true victims of this kind of coercion-the displaced themselves.
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. It explains how unilateral, national-level responses have made the EU as a whole particularly susceptible to a unique brand of coercive bargaining that relies on the threat (or actual generation) of mass population movements as a non-military instrument of state-level coercion. After outlining who employs this kind of foreign policy tool, to what ends, and under what circumstances, the article offers an illustration of this kind of coercion in action, by analyzing the March 2016 deal between the EU and Turkey. The article concludes with a discussion of broader consequences of the deal and implications both for the displaced and for the EU going forward.
The science of fake news Lazer, David M J; Baum, Matthew A; Benkler, Yochai ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
03/2018, Letnik:
359, Številka:
6380
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Addressing fake news requires a multidisciplinary effort
The rise of fake news highlights the erosion of long-standing institutional bulwarks against misinformation in the internet age. Concern over ...the problem is global. However, much remains unknown regarding the vulnerabilities of individuals, institutions, and society to manipulations by malicious actors. A new system of safeguards is needed. Below, we discuss extant social and computer science research regarding belief in fake news and the mechanisms by which it spreads. Fake news has a long history, but we focus on unanswered scientific questions raised by the proliferation of its most recent, politically oriented incarnation. Beyond selected references in the text, suggested further reading can be found in the supplementary materials.
Rumor Has It Greenhill, Kelly M.; Oppenheim, Ben
International studies quarterly,
09/2017, Letnik:
61, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Rumors run rife in areas affected by political instability and conflict. Their adoption plays a key role in igniting many forms of violence, including riots, ethnic conflict, genocide, and war. While ...unverified at the time of transmission, some rumors are widely treated as truth, while others are dismissed as implausible or false. What factors lead individuals to embrace rumors and other forms of unverified information? This article presents a new theoretical framework for understanding individual receptivity to rumors and tests it using original survey data gathered in insurgency-affected areas of Thailand and the Philippines. We find wide variation in rumor adoption, and argue that three factors drive individuals to embrace rumors: worldview, threat perception, and prior exposure. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find no evidence that commonly cited factors—including education, income, age, and gender—determine individual receptivity to rumors. We also explore the implications of belief in rumors on conflict dynamics. We find that greater receptivity to rumors correlates with the belief that ongoing conflict is intractable. This suggests that rumors can not only help spark political violence, but also impede its resolution. Our findings shed light on the complex interaction between worldview and unverified information in shaping popular beliefs—and through them, political contention and competition—in conflict areas and beyond.
Introducing the concept of transactional forced migration (TFM), this article examines cases of migration ‘deal-making’, such as the 2022 UK–Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership. It ...identifies the under-appreciated connections between TFM and other dimensions of diplomacy and international politics.
Abstract
Former US President Donald J. Trump was infamous for his nakedly transactional approach to politics. However, as we demonstrate in this article through the lens of migration politics, this kind of unabashedly transactional approach is less an outlier than a common feature of contemporary international politics. Drawing in part upon initial findings from our ongoing Diplomacy of Forced Migration Dataset Project, we explore historical and contemporary cases to illustrate how transactional migration management ‘deals’ such as the 2022 UK–Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership are not particularly new, unusual, or revolutionary. In this exploration of the long history of deal-making in the realm of forced migration management, we first define the phenomenon—which we term transactional forced migration (TFM)—and situate it within the growing literature on migration diplomacy, externalization and what is known as the instrumentalization and/or weaponization of migration. We then highlight illustrative historical precedents that presage what we are witnessing today. We additionally identify and unpack several of the under-appreciated connections between TFM schemes and other dimensions of diplomacy and international politics. We conclude with a summary of our argument, its implications for contemporary policy and a few thoughts about what current trends suggest the future is likely to hold.
In a highly influential article in International Security, Stephen Stedman introduced a model of "civil war spoilers," which focused valuable attention on the generally underappreciated role of ...elites in determining the course of negotiations and in implementing intrastate peace accords. For all its virtues, however, the spoiler model did not suggest the best set of strategies for deterring or defeating those who might seek to undermine peace processes. This is because context-specific and actor-specific measures tend to affect diplomatic instruments only at the margin and because, while spoiler type does not change over time, actors' commitment to fulfilling the provisions of peace accords often does; thus these static characteristics cannot be the critical variables the spoiler model suggests they are. Instead, as a detailed reexamination of three of Stedman's case studies (i.e., Angola, Mozambique, and Cambodia) demonstrates, a capabilities-based model offers a more parsimonious and generalizable explanation for why, when, and under what conditions actors who seek to undermine the peace will emerge or retreat. As such, the real key to deterring and defeating would-be spoilers lies in the possession and exercise of the material power to coerce or co-opt them, rather than in the capacity to discern their true character or personality type.
In this essay we argue for the utility of moving from a “national” to an “entangled global” perspective on security. Focusing on the post-1945 international context, we discuss how the concept of ...“globality” can inform and reframe our understanding of transnational security dynamics and help move us beyond traditional state-centric frameworks. Such a move enables a better understanding of historical events and contemporary security dynamics than classical “national security” frameworks alone. After outlining the rationale behind our call for expanding the aperture in the study of security, we theorize security entanglement as a particularly important form of globality with its own internal dynamics and show how the entanglement framework allows us to rethink the post-1945 security environment and events within it. We then focus on three illustrative forms of security entanglement that have been underexplored in security studies: the global nature of the Cold War; dynamics of decolonization and its legacies; and the relationship between migration and security. We conclude by discussing the implications of security entanglement for future visions of world security.
Big, attention-grabbing numbers are frequently used in policy debates and media reporting: "At least 200,000-250,000 people died in the war in Bosnia." "There are three million child soldiers in ...Africa." "More than 650,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the U.S. occupation of Iraq." "Between 600,000 and 800,000 women are trafficked across borders every year." "Money laundering represents as much as 10 percent of global GDP." "Internet child porn is a $20 billion-a-year industry."
Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill see only one problem: these numbers are probably false. Their continued use and abuse reflect a much larger and troubling pattern: policymakers and the media naively or deliberately accept highly politicized and questionable statistical claims about activities that are extremely difficult to measure. As a result, we too often become trapped by these mythical numbers, with perverse and counterproductive consequences.
This problem exists in myriad policy realms. But it is particularly pronounced in statistics related to the politically charged realms of global crime and conflict-numbers of people killed in massacres and during genocides, the size of refugee flows, the magnitude of the illicit global trade in drugs and human beings, and so on. InSex, Drugs, and Body Counts, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and policy analysts critically examine the murky origins of some of these statistics and trace their remarkable proliferation. They also assess the standard metrics used to evaluate policy effectiveness in combating problems such as terrorist financing, sex trafficking, and the drug trade.
With the implosion of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and with a Russia considerably weakened for two decades thereafter, the United States found itself the lone superpower and faced fewer ...constraints than before in projecting its military power abroad. During this period of unipolarity, the United States began issuing a series of coercive threats against smaller, less powerful states, as well as militarily intervening in them. Over more than 25 years, these threats and interventions were directed against Iraq (1990-1991), Somalia (1992-2993), Haiti (1994), North Korea (1994), Bosnia (1995), Iraq again (1998), Kosovo and Serbia (1998-1999), Afghanistan (2001-), Iraq yet again (2003-2011), Libya (2011), Syria (2014-), Iraq still yet again (2015-), and North Korea (2017-). Despite the overwhelming power disparities between the United States and its myriad small targets, compellent successes did not come easily. Even when successful, the outcomes of these gambits were too often not as decisive and enduring as U.S. policymakers had hoped, as the repeated appearance of Iraq as a target of U.S. coercion efforts illustrates. Moreover, the United States' underwhelming post-Cold War compellent track record is not unique or even unusual, for compellence by the powerful against the weak has historically proven difficult.
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