Refugees and Diplomacy in Power Politics

Despite scholarly investigation of states’ involvement with migratory processes, we still do not know the full gamut of states’ use of migrant and refugee communities in their foreign policymaking or the factors that affect the success of such practices. In fact, a comprehensive theoretical framework has yet to emerge on the foreign-policy dimension of cross-border mobility management. This project will contribute to the development of the first comprehensive dataset of how the manipulation of cross-border migration features in states’ diplomatic strategies. The project examines, firstly, how sender states manipulate migration stock and flows in order to force target states’ compliance; secondly, the conditions that affect these processes’ success or failure; and, finally, the relationship between these processes and broader patterns of interstate aggression. Overall, It constitutes an innovative, timely, and ambitious theory-building research project that informs responses to states’ use of migrant and refugees as instruments of refugee diplomacy that speaks to interdisciplinary debates on the topic.