“Not bullets or bombs, but human beings” : A comparative case study on Coercive Engineered Migration in Turkey 2016 and Belarus 2021

In the wars of today, the combat is not exclusively waged by soldiers on the grounds and the weapons are not always guns or bombs. Rather, the modern warfare reigns on both digitally, physically, and psychologically at all hours of the day and is conducted by both state and non-state actors. One aspect of this modern warfare is the usage of migrants and migration as a weapon. In the midst of the 2015 migration crisis, Turkey, a passing point for a lot of the migrants to reach Europe, got generous deals with the EU. And in 2021, Middle Eastern migrants began showing up at the Polish-Belarusian border, despite there not existing any direct refugee passages to that region. This study examines if this type of warfare, where the coercer enables migration as a weapon, had been used against the EU by the two states Turkey and Belarus. The thesis basis of Kelly M. Greenhill’s theory of coercive engineered migration, where three criterias has to be fulfilled for a migration influx to be classified as coercively engineered. These are: Was it (largely) orchestrated? Was it strategic? and Was it coercive? The design of the thesis is a comparative case study and the method a qualitative text analysis. This thesis's results were that Turkey and Belarus used coercive engineered migration against the EU, to destabilize the union. The conclusions are that although both cases can be said to have employed this tactic, they do not match perfectly with the questions. For future research, it could be advantageous to implement a scale and to not only provide yes- or no alternatives for these questions. Another aspect for further research is to analyze why the response from the EU differed so much between Turkey and Belarus. Belarus was sanctioned and scolded by the EU, while Turkey got a generous deal and only careful statements was made.