Actors in forced migration: an interview with Kelly Greenhill.

• Position: Interview

Dr. Kelly Greenhill is an associate professor at Tufts University and a research fellow in the Belfer Center's International Security Program at Harvard University. She studies the security of migration change. Her work focuses on new security challenges, including forced migrations, and how these may be used as a political weapon or a tool for diplomacy. Her recent book, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy, won the 2011 International Studies Association's Best Book of the Year award. Greenhill also was a co-author and coeditor (with Peter Andreas) of Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict. She spoke with the Journal about her work and how she sees forced migrations playing out on today's world stage.

Journal of International Affairs: In your work, you have analyzed forced migration in three different, recurring forms. Can you describe these?

Kelly Greenhill: There are three kinds of coercers, two of which serve a more active role and one that is more passive. The first type is generators, and those are actors who, as the name implies, act directly to either create or threaten to create migration or refugee crises with the intent of coercing a target. A prominent historical example would be Fidel Castro, who has used this technique three times against the United States. Most famously, Castro did so in 1980 with the Mariel boatlift, which resulted in 125,000 uninvited Cubans landing in the United States.

Slobodan Milosevic also tried this in the lead-up to and during the war over Kosovo in 1999, albeit less successfully. But, for a time, it appeared that he would be successful, given widespread concerns in Europe about further inflows of refugees from the Balkans. In some sense, we are seeing something of a redux of this kind of panic now, although the cast of characters has changed.

Agents provocateurs, the second type, also serve in an active role, but they do not create outflows of people themselves. Rather, they act indirectly to catalyze or stimulate the creation of outflows by others. So for instance, to stick with the Kosovo example, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) quite intentionally and explicitly attacked Serbian targets, including police officers and other officials, knowing full well that the Serbian government and Serbian security forces would crack down brutally, thus generating outflows from Kosovo. And members of the ICLA leadership acknowledged as much. This technique was also used by the National Liberation Front in the French-Algerian War and certainly by other groups as well.

The...