Strategic Engineered Migration as Weapon of War
Researchers have discovered a very interesting fact related to the use of social networking sites. It has come to light that calls on Twitter for refugees to travel to Germany have mostly come from the US. The time spent practising in other countries has not been in vain – from Iran during the 2009 presidential elections to Egypt and Tunisia, where the role played by social networking sites in mobilising the population was considerable.
What we are seeing now is the practical implementation of theoretical calculations of a strategic nature. Such strategies have been under development for a long time. One of them is a study by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University that bears the name
“Strategic Engineered Migration as a Weapon of War“, which the author also uses for the title of this article. The study was first published in 2008 in the Civil Wars journal. Using a combination of statistical data and case study analysis, the author of the work, Kelly Greenhill, provides answers to the following questions: can refugees be a specific type of weapon, can this weapon only be used in wartime or in peacetime as well, and just how successful can its exploitation be? On the whole, Greenhill answers these questions in the affirmative.