By Sardar Khan Niazi

In an age where warfare is no longer confined to battlefields or defined by armies in uniform, nations have devised new ways to exert power without firing a single shot. Among the most unsettling tools in this new landscape of hybrid warfare is the manipulation of human movement–turning vulnerable refugee populations into instruments of geopolitical coercion. This tactic, often described as weaponized migration, is neither theoretical nor new. However, its growing use in contemporary conflicts, from Europe’s borders to the Middle East and South Asia, demands urgent global attention. Traditional discourse frames refugees as a humanitarian burden that states struggle to accommodate. However, in the hands of opportunistic regimes, refugee outflows and inflows become a form of strategic advantage. Author Kelly M. Greenhill, who pioneered the term coercive engineered migration, identified how governments intentionally create, manipulate, or threaten mass population movements to achieve political or military objectives. The aim is simple: exert pressure on targeted states by overwhelming their social systems, inflaming internal politics, or extracting concessions. Consider the Syrian civil war, where the Assad regime understood that mass displacement into Europe would reshape European domestic politics–fueling far-right populism, polarizing societies, and complicating Western consensus on intervention in Syria. Belarus, in 2021, orchestrated the movement of thousands of migrants toward the Polish and Lithuanian borders–facilitating visas, providing transport, and guiding people to the frontier–explicitly to retaliate against EU sanctions. In Libya, rival factions have repeatedly used migrant flows as bargaining chips with European states anxious to curb irregular migration across the Mediterranean. In each case, desperate civilians became pawns in a geopolitical chess game they never volunteered to play. Unlike tanks or missiles, migration as a weapon is cheap, deniable, and effective. It allows states to exploit the moral and legal obligations of rival nations: democracies, in particular, face acute political dilemmas when confronted with humanitarian crises at their borders. For Pakistan, this debate is not academic. As host to one of the world’s largest refugee populations Pakistan understands both the humanitarian realities of displacement and the strategic implications. The country has repeatedly absorbed refugee flows triggered not by natural crises but by deliberate actions–Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s rise, the US-led intervention, and now deepening internal Afghan instability. While Pakistan has never weaponized these flows, it has certainly endured the most of geopolitical decisions made elsewhere. Moreover, as global powers increasingly politicize migration, Pakistan finds itself navigating a world in which refugee management is no longer a humanitarian question alone, but a strategic one. Closing borders to refugees contradicts international law and moral responsibility. Opening them unconditionally invites political backlash at home. Engaging with regimes that manufacture refugee flows risks normalizing the practice. The answer lies in strengthening international norms: holding states accountable when they manipulate human displacement; improving global early-warning systems for engineered migration crises; creating equitable burden-sharing mechanisms; and, critically, addressing the root causes of displacement, from conflict to climate insecurity. The most tragic aspect of weaponized migration is that it dehumanizes entire populations. Families fleeing war, persecution, and economic collapse are not soldiers, not bargaining chips, and not pressure points to be exploited. They are people seeking safety and dignity. When states treat human movement as a weapon, they erode the very principles of international order. In a fragmented world grappling with conflicts from Gaza to Ukraine, from Sudan to Afghanistan, we must reaffirm a simple truth: using vulnerable people as instruments of coercion is not strategy. And unless the global community confronts this tactic with clarity and resolve, refugee flows will remain not just a symptom of conflict, but a tool of it.