Description
Organised population transfers, expulsions, and exchanges have been a surprisingly common feature of international politics, but little is known about the state-level diplomacy that has accompanied such processes. As a result, separate fields of inquiry within foreign policy, security, and migration studies have yet to be placed in conversation with one another in order to understand the relationship between forced migration and diplomacy. This paper starts this critical conversation by addressing two key questions: 1) What diplomatic interests, tools and processes have shaped instances of forced migration? 2) What have been the diplomatic causes and effects of state-organised forced migration, and how do they relate to other international political arenas? To answer these questions, we draw upon our original globally-focused dataset of incidents of organised forced migration driven by, or resulting in, bilateral or multilateral initiatives. We further highlight implications of the evolution of the interplay between migration and foreign policy, while paying particular attention to regional and geographic variation. Overall, the paper adds a missing component to existing work on forced migration and diplomacy and draws attention to our new dataset as an important resource to policymakers and scholars of migration, international relations, security, diplomatic history, and international law.
