Coercive engineered migrations and environmental stress
2025-10-03
Countries can deliberately create, manipulate and exploit cross-border population movements to induce concessions from a target. Such ‘coercive engineered migrations’ are more likely to be successful when targeting domestically unstable states. I argue that environmental stress can add to this instability and ‘swamp’ a target’s ability to cope with cross-border population movements. Ultimately, the chances of migration-driven coercion to be successful should increase when target countries are both domestically unstable and suffer from environmental shocks. This claim is tested using quantitative data on the outcomes of coercive engineered migrations since the 1950s, which I combine with information on environmental extremes, as measured by the number of environmental disasters. Controlling for several other influences that may affect the outcome and employing sample-selection estimators that account for the non-random assignment of coercive engineered migration, the results support the argument as I show that the likelihood of successful migration-related coercion increases when domestically unstable target countries also face environmental disasters. This finding contributes to our understanding of migration as a foreign-policy instrument, it sheds new light on the role of environmental stress in international bargaining, and there are direct implications for conflict as a driver of cross-border population movements.