The International Politics of Mobility Sanctions

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This project aims to theorise the increasingly common, yet under-examined, use of migration as a foreign policy instrument by bringing work on economic sanctions into conversation with the literature on the politics of cross-border mobility. With a focus on migration into, out of, and across the Middle East, MOBSANCT proposes a novel framework of "mobility sanctions" to explain the rationale behind a range of processes, including Turkish use of Syrian refugees to elicit European financial and political concessions, and to gage their likelihood of success.There exists a lack of a comprehensive framework incorporating the use of both forced and labour migration as an instrument of interstate leverage by Western and non-Western countries alike. MOBSANCT addresses this key gap by focusing on the seven countries involved in largest waves of migration into, out of, and across the Middle East (France, Germany, India, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates). It identifies how they served as senders or targets of "mobility sanctions," as well as the determinants of sanctions' success, in the 1945-2021 period. The project is methodologically innovative in combining Qualitative Comparative Analysis and process tracing in order to address the cases' complexity in a systematic manner that establishes relations of sufficiency and necessity between (combinations of) conditions and certain outcomes.With an interdisciplinary approach bridging international relations and migration studies, MOBSANCT argues against problematic "sending," "transit," and "host" state conceptualisations, while repositioning the Global South as central to theory development on the politics of cross-border mobility. MOBSANCT offers the first global dataset on the use of labour and forced migration as an instrument of foreign policy, while building a straightforward theoretical framework for policymakers that enables the design of effective responses to migration and refugee crises.