Abstract
Theorizing of forced migration and refugees has been paralyzed by excessive reliance on migration theory. This article suggests the need to transfer conceptualizations of forced migration to sociological theories of violence. To that end, a preliminary step is argued to be indispensable: the affirmation of the force factor as a vital concept for meaningful theorization of refugee phenomena. Conceptual and empirical reasons are offered to resurrect the force factor’s centrality. First, I suggest the need to resolve the conceptual residuality of “forced migration” in sociological theory, proposing manageable terminology for the task at hand. Second, I sketch conceptual and empirical reasons that the force factor is a viable and urgent candidate for our theoretical toolkit. Finally, I assess in depth the shortcomings of three prominent relativization conditions: (1) unwitting severity; (2) processual dilution; and (3) political-economic indeterminacy. By overcoming onerous relativization habits, we open horizons for coercion-centric theoretical insights on forced migration.
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Notes
Bouzanis and Kemp (2019) helpfully distinguish “synectic” from “antinomic” residuals (285). Indeed, there is a general division among migration scholars between those (e.g. Piguet, 2013; Castles et al., 2014) who treat the refugee category as a synectic residual (hoping to integrate it successfully, one way or another, into conceptualizations of general migration), and those (e.g. Massey et al., 1993) who treat it as antinomic (striving to minimize, dismiss, or otherwise exclude refugees to preserve extant migration theory).
It is indicative that the phrase “forced migration” has appeared only four times in Theory and Society, always tangentially (Autry, 2013; Sanghera et al., 2011; Joppke, 1996; Frank, 1975); and a single time in Sociological Theory (Campbell, 2009:153), to be excluded from genocide, the subject. Incidentally, Campbell’s argument – that genocide is an exercise in social control, not deviance – bears much more directly on refugees than he allows.
Zolberg (1983); Zolberg et al. (1986, 1989). Though literature reviews routinely pay courteous homage to this work, its central theoretical contribution – that structural violence is the ultimate explanandum of refugee waves – has steadily receded in significance. As we will demonstrate [Refugee agency conflation], this thesis has not only been ignored, but misrepresented.
For instance, what Kunz (1973) called “forms” of displacement (by flight, force and absence) are in fact causes of displacement and non-repatriation (i.e. force factors) masquerading as social types (“Civilian evacuees,” “The Banished,” “Travellers” [sic], etc.) (140).
In the context of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy in particular, systematically recognizing such causes has only recently been attempted (Vine et al., 2020).
I immediately hasten to say that relativization is not the same as denial: none of the excellent forced migration theorists examined below do anything approaching the latter.
In scholarship, severity is often operationalized as volume of displacement: the bigger the refugee wave, surely, the greater the force factor (e.g. [Syrian refugees > Iraqi refugees] → [Syrian civil war severity > Iraqi war severity]). Ethnic proportions of visible refugee movements and the inconspicuousness of IDPs are another basis for comparative severity (e.g. [salience of Kurds fleeing Syria > salience of Alawites inside Syria] → [anti-Kurdish force factor is more severe]). But severity is also controversially inferred from relative “shock value” and “issue-fatigue” surrounding protracted conflicts, with selection bias towards “fresh” force factors in early stages (e.g. Syrian war in 2015) at the expense of “monotonous” later stages that objectively expel far more people (e.g. Syrian war in 2020). All the while, the fact that displacement (e.g. 2010, 2017 Iraqi refugee waves) peaks years after force factor onset (e.g. 2003 Iraq invasion; 2014 ISIS ascendency) is readily mistaken for a rise in severity.
Prima face, it is not-at-all obvious why: the overwhelming majority of displaced are IDPs in a handful of countries, while ten states in only two-to-three regions have accounted for over two-thirds of all refugees for decades (UNHCR, 2018). It is striking that refugee-production – one of the least globalized and most spatially-segregated migration branches – has been allowed to serve as symbol of global macro-phenomena.
It is forgotten that Wimmer and Schiller (2002) conclude by equadistancing themselves from “methodological fluidism” – a “Schilla,” they call it (600) – and from “methodological nationalism.” Transnationalism approaches to refugees have certainly overindulged in the former.
Mussolini’s foreign minister published the proverb in his diary in 1942 (Keyes, 2007:234).
Among those, very few found sanctuary in Christian Warsaw until liberation (“single-vector”); but most fled onwards to rural Poland (“two-vector”?), a neighboring country (“three-vector”?), or multiple subsequent international sites (who’s counting?) such as Switzerland, Palestine and Shanghai. Once again, captive forced migrants are omitted: the most unspeakable “one-vector” move was, of course, of Warsaw Ghetto residents transported by rail into the death camps. The reasons to exclude these movements from the migratory process are as weak as the reasons to include movements from outside Poland onward.
Insofar as the Nazis’ industrialized mass murder is what determined “acuteness” and was being “anticipated,” force factor severity escalated: Germany transitioned from a two-step ghettoization/internment policy followed by transportation to death camps, to a one-step directly-to-camps policy (Bade, 2008:212).
Employed to explain internal-displacement vis-à-vis long-distance forced migration, Chatterji’s (2013) “mobility capital” ultimately collapses back into “networks, cash, know-how, and skills” (296) – social and human capital. The causal weight of violence from India’s partition, meanwhile, is downgraded.
Marx (1990) muddies the water further when he evokes an even vaguer “boundless social universe, too large and complex to be comprehended, but which affects all we think and do” (193), of which the refugee’s pivotal “social world” is only a part. The “extent to which personal social worlds are disturbed and transformed” appears to be equated simply with the constancy of social networks (191). But the eagerness to integrate social anthropological approaches to “the social world” unfortunately collided with pragmatic, mezzo- and micro-level “social network” theory.
Theoretically, eminent refugee scholars who conceptualized force factors have also offered the most effective scrutiny of trigger reductionism by postulating (i) revolutions and (ii) polity reconfigurations as contextual causes (Zolberg et al., 1986). Empirically, researchers routinely differentiate catalysts from causes: Bohra-Mishra & Massey (2011), notably, operationalized “root causes” (e.g. poverty) and “proximate causes” (e.g. violence escalation) in such a way as to distinguish them from “intervening variables” (e.g. social capital) which – in their view – do not even deserve to be called causal (7–9).
The conceptual shift to “mixed migration” (van Hear et al., 2009; Schuster, 2015) has arguably been crudest in upholding the indeterminacy. The claim is not merely that “asylum seekers have multiple reasons for mobility” besides asylum (Castles, 2003:17) – a truism no-one disputes. Rather, it is the peculiar notion that, since refugees are accompanied by non-refugees and endure non-political horrors (especially in camps), their original displacement can be conceptually merged with that of ordinary migrants. Schuster’s (2015) treatment of Afghan refugees (299) is symptomatic: forced migration from Afghanistan is evoked as a prototypical “mixed migrants” case – supposed proof of the inadequacy of politically-determined forced migration. Given post-Taliban migration, their de facto integration into Pakistan, the decades-long duration of displacement, levels of repatriation, economic and education hardships, and oscillating status-designations by governments, Afghan refugees are offered as ultimate proof of the futility of “unmixing migrants” and the folly of “insistence on neat categories” (ibid). Meanwhile, there is not a single mention of a prominent force factor – namely, the 2001 Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan – that surely distinguishes the fate of Afghan refugees in this period.
Scholars who pursue empirically-disaggregating political from economic “push factors” often confess that their exercise is a fool’s errand, prefacing their attempts with profuse warnings and qualifications about operationalization. The methodological difficulty of disentangling political from economic forces behind migration is occasionally itself offered as proof of rough parity between them. Adhikari (2013) found that migrant decision-making in conflict-induced displacement is deeply intertwined with non-political considerations “even when life is under extreme threat” (88). Shellman and Stewart (2007) affirm “economic” and “security factors” almost equally regarding Haitian refugees. Others find political force factors causally dominant (Schmeidl, 1997; Lundquist & Massey, 2005; Stanley, 1987). We need not adjudicate, nor bother to extract a scholarly consensus regarding causal primacy. But it is sobering to acknowledge that theoretical work on forced migration – clinging to the indeterminacy condition, even at the price of conceptual paralysis – has lagged far behind practical empirical “legwork” that has sensibly, pragmatically operationalized the distinction across a variety of historical and regional contexts. Indeed, sociologists of violence have been so sophisticated as to produce forensic analyses of force factors with precision worthy of war crimes courts. Notably, Ball (2000) and colleagues (Krüger et al., 2013) analyzed Kosovo Albanian refugee dynamics for the Hague Tribunal, aiding historic war crimes convictions. Celebrated as an exemplar of “public sociology” (Hagan et al., 2006:338–340), this momentous accomplishment of force factor analysis has been ignored by theory entirely.
Though Wallerstein and colleagues were undoubtedly more orthodox Marxian, the forced-migration-as-globalization theorists significantly preserved the World System infrastructure by substituting North-South for core-periphery. Though unacknowledged as such, Zolberg et al. (1989) were the earliest to directly conceptualize refugees as elements of the “globalization of social conflict” (230–2), but without sacrificing the political sphere. For a critique of economic reductionism in analyses of migration determinants, see Richmond (1988:11–13).
More than half of all refugees come from just three countries, and more than two-thirds come from just five: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia (UNHCR, 2018).
In other words, Castles (2003) misplaces these two “Dynamics of Mobility” considerations into the “Causes of Forced Migration” (28), where they evidently do not belong. The misplacement only becomes reasonable if one presupposes the indeterminacy condition.
At worst, “economic” is treated as a surrogate for free migration, but “political” was presumed to imply unfree migration. For review and critique of the conflation, see Zolberg et al. (1989:30–31).
The “international community” that Betts evokes as potential protector also happens to be a major contributor to refugee-production (Vine et al., 2020; Gatrell, 2013; Blum, 2003; Zolberg et al., 1986). But determining the obligations, under international and human rights law, of major powers to “survival migrants” is possible without any empirical investigation whatever into how those powers generate forced migration. This is obvious to any refugee advocate or practitioner, who knows this to be the regular, pragmatic approach.
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Mandić, D. What is the force of forced migration? Diagnosis and critique of a conceptual relativization. Theor Soc 51, 61–90 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09446-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09446-0