While the world is keeping its eyes on Ukraine, monitoring tensions in the South China Sea, and discussing the future of NATO, something else is happening on the Polish-Finnish-Russian border, in the freezing forests of Finland and Russia, and in the rough Aegean Sea. This has been going on for quite some time now, but it has not made headlines like tank parades do because it is a quiet war, yet one that shapes the security architecture of democratic countries.

Refugees and migrants are moving across borders in numbers that scare governments; politicians are being voted out of office for their stance on the problem; societies are falling apart because of it—in many cases, if not all, at levels too large to ignore. The whole process is not the result of an accident, but it is planned. Borders have become battlegrounds, while migration has been weaponized.

It needs to be said that it is not about the migrants themselves here. Men, women, and children who are crossing borders are, for the most part, fleeing from terrible conditions, which include war, poverty, and persecution. They are victims of circumstances that forced them to leave, as well as victims of states that use their movement to their advantage.

What Does It Actually Mean to Weaponize Migration?

The phrase is widely used in politics as a rhetorical device to refer to any immigration policy that one does not like. This, in turn, serves to cloud a critical issue, which makes it necessary to be precise.

The term “weaponization of migration” or “coercive engineered migration” refers to the control over the movement of populations by one state in order to achieve some political, economic, or military advantage over another target state. Weaponized migration does not refer to the voluntary movement of people but rather to the choice made by one state whether to start or stop the process of preventing certain population movement.

It is an important distinction to make. The influx of one million refugees into Europe following a conflict can be termed a humanitarian emergency, whereas a situation in which a government chooses to issue visas to people from other nations, fly them into a border town, and coordinate their entry into the country while carrying out military exercises is quite different.

This logic is striking in its cynicism, and democratic countries are especially vulnerable to it. They function under the pressure of their own publics, under the burden of international humanitarian obligations, and in a political environment that has migration as a highly polarized and controversial subject. The arrival of a large number of people on one’s border automatically creates a situation of security concern, humanitarian dilemma, media scandal, and political crisis for nothing, without even sending a single soldier into the enemy territory.

This method functions due to the very true dilemma between the right of a state to regulate its borders and its humanitarian responsibilities towards asylum seekers. One cannot respond to such tactics properly, as they create a double bind: crack down on the migrants harshly and create images of brutality used by the propagandists, or tolerate the flow of people and prove the effectiveness of the strategy and thus encourage further actions.

The Mechanics: How a State Turns People Into Pressure

In practice, the operational models have typically followed a structured pattern across cases. Firstly, the state that wants to act aggressively against another state selects certain migrants or refugees who are already in motion, people who are coming from conflict zones like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, or the Horn of Africa, and are trying to reach Europe or any other........

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