Migration as a Hybrid Weapon: Turkey, Morocco and Belarus

Migration as a weapon — in academic literature, coercive engineered migration; in the language of European institutions, «instrumentalization of migrants» — describes a situation in which a state deliberately triggers, facilitates or stops containing a cross-border movement of people in order to obtain political, economic or diplomatic concessions from another state. It is a form of grey-zone pressure: there is no gunfire, but there is a calculated state action that shifts the cost onto a third party and, above all, onto the migrants themselves, who become the instrument.

The conceptual framework: Kelly Greenhill

The main academic reference is Weapons of Mass Migration (Cornell University Press, 2010), by political scientist Kelly M. Greenhill, who identified and catalogued more than fifty episodes between 1951 and 2006 in which population flows were used as a coercive instrument. Greenhill distinguishes between those generating the flow, agents who channel it, and targets who bear the pressure, and argues that the method's effectiveness depends on the internal political vulnerability of the receiving country: the more divisive immigration is in its public debate, the greater the leverage for blackmail.

Turkey and the agreement with the European Union

Turkey hosts the largest refugee population in the world: around 3.6 million Syrians under temporary protection, according to UNHCR. The EU-Turkey Statement of March 2016 established the return of irregular migrants arriving on Greek islands in exchange, among other points, for €6 billion in aid for refugees in Turkey. In February 2020, amid an escalation in Idlib and after the deaths of dozens of Turkish soldiers, Ankara announced it would stop containing departures toward Europe. Thousands of people gathered at the Pazarkule-Kastanies crossing on the border with Greece, in scenes of clashes with Greek police that lasted for weeks. Athens temporarily suspended the registration of asylum applications, a measure that UNHCR and the Council of Europe considered contrary to international law.

Ceuta, May 2021

Between May 17 and 18, 2021, between 8,000 and 10,000 people — around 1,500 of them minors, according to figures from the Spanish government and organizations on the ground — entered Ceuta by swimming or going around the border breakwater, after Moroccan border guards visibly relaxed control of the Tarajal crossing. The episode coincided with the diplomatic crisis triggered by the hospitalization, in Logroño, of Polisario Front leader Brahim Ghali. Rabat denied any instrumentalization, but the European Parliament passed a resolution on June 10, 2021 rejecting «the use of border controls and children as a form of political pressure».

Belarus and the EU's eastern border

In 2021, following European sanctions over the post-election crackdown and the forced diversion of Ryanair flight FR4978, Minsk facilitated the arrival of thousands of people from the Middle East via visas and charter flights, then directing them toward the borders of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. The EU openly described the events as a «hybrid attack». The European Commission proposed emergency measures in December 2021 and later incorporated the concept of instrumentalization into the Pact on Migration and Asylum. The crisis left at least around twenty dead in the forested border area, according to counts by NGOs and Polish authorities.

The legal and humanitarian problem

Labeling a flow as «instrumentalized» has practical consequences: it is used to justify expedited asylum procedures, border detentions or temporary suspensions of guarantees. UNHCR, the Council of Europe and organizations such as Amnesty International have repeatedly warned that the responsibility of the state that triggers the flow does not nullify the individual right to seek international protection, nor the prohibition of collective expulsions, set out in Article 4 of Protocol No. 4 to the European Convention on Human Rights. In the N.D. and N.T. v. Spain ruling (2020), the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights qualified that principle, in a decision widely debated by legal scholars.

• Not every increase in arrivals reflects a state strategy: wars, economic and climate crises explain most flows.
• Attribution requires evidence: verifiable changes in border control, coordinated visa issuance or official statements.
• The human cost falls on people who did not choose their role in the diplomatic dispute.