Protest on the Rise?. Adriaan Kühn

      COPING WITH WAR, ECONOMIC CRISIS AND MIGRATION

      Mario Sznajder

      It is difficult to measure the impact of war in any given society since it depends not only on the intensity of the fighting, use of different kinds of weapons, length of the fighting period and other empirical factors, but also on the stage of development of the country, the state and society resources employed in defending the population, and cultural traditions about war. War can be defined as an armed conflict between societies, within societies or a combination of both, which is the more common type of war in the last decades. Richard Smalley (Nobel Prize of Chemistry) has defined war as the sixth most important problem (together with terrorism) between the ten main issues that affect human life.

      Source: Smalley, (2003).

      Looking at the list, it is clear that all the problems mentioned are interlinked in a cause-effect-cause relationship. The military-theoretical aspect of this assessment was developed in the 1930s by Erich Ludendorff when he enunciated his theory about Total War, which influenced perceptions and attitudes towards the 2nd World War and even more so, afterwards (Ludendorff, 1935). For the purposes of this work, the main significance of the total war theory is that the war-affected societies are entangled in a process from which there is no escape. This means looking for a place of refuge outside the area at war, generating waves of migration by refugees of war. In between actual war and migration we also find, in most of the cases, deep socio-economic crises related to infrastructural damages, economic paralysis, disinvestment, high rates of inflation, and lack of shelters, lack of food and medicine and disarticulation of any form of normal life. These economic critical situations articulate with the immediate danger of loss of life, personal and family physical damage and the psychosocial impact of total lack of security. These constitute strong incentives for migration and seeking a refugee status or asylum somewhere not affected by war. The research question of this paper is about the causes of massive migrations of refugees and what nation-states, regional organizations and the UN can do in order to alleviate the multiple problems that such waves of migration create in the “host” countries.

      If we take the ten most important problems affecting humanity and link them to war-economic crises situations we can state that refugee-migrants will try to reach places where energy, water and food provision are safe and regular; they will try to settle in places that are safe from an environmental point of view and allow them economic opportunities to overcome poverty; they will try to get as far as possible away from war areas or those hard-hit by terror, to areas not affected by widespread disease; to democratic places where education is accessible and are not hostile and crowded.

      This combination of “ideal” places for refugee-migrants leaves us with a relatively short list of Western European, North American and Australian democracies. If to this we add the problem of accessibility - and most of the refugee-migrants today come from Western and Central Asia and Africa – the list is further reduced to Western European democracies since Australia and North America are too far away and difficult to reach for poor migrants. Therefore, one of the main problems should be why and how do Western European democracies – a category extended to the members of the European Union and Great Britain – react to the problem of refugees-migrants trying to enter their territories.

      Although moral considerations play a part in the political decision-making process, the issue of refugee-migration is so complex, from this point of view, that in this work it will not be addressed. In an ideal world, wherever people are in danger and suffer, they should be saved and helped by those that are in a better situation. Unfortunately, ours is far from being an ideal world, especially from the political and economic point of view. Moreover, modern public means of communication unintendedly play with human tragedy and generate shockwaves of public opinion brought about by sensationalist reporting of the most terrible tragedies - especially when they play to the emotions and fears of the general public. The case of the use of chemical weapons against the civil population of Idlib in Syria and its vicinity at the beginning of April 2017 serves as an example. In a country where in six years of civil and international war more than half a million people have been killed without generating the outcry that the use of chemical weapons did, one should ask whether the public opinion and political reaction that followed the chemical attacks are not a massive demonstration of cynicism.

      For many decades, research has been carried out on the issues of migration and refugees and again, in an ideal world, the results of these researches should be used to generate the best possible policiess to deal with the complexity of these issues. Moreover, since the problems of migration-refugees are massive and are caused by well-known phenomena, the effort to alleviate and solve them should also be massive – regionally and internationally – and coordinated, in order to obtain the best possible results from the decisions taken, policies applied and resources invested.

      The UNHCR is confronting the problem of refugees, together with many local organization but the scope of the issue, according to UNHRC sources, is far too great for any international institutional and financial to tackle with it. Dealing with more than 65 million displaced people all over the world (internally and internationally displaced) UNHCR addresses the predicament of more than 21 million refugees. Of these, 5.2 million Palestinian refugees have been cared for by UNRWA in refugee camps in the Middle East since 1948 and 16.1 million are under the mandate of UNHCR. 10 million are stateless people and more than 107,000 were resettled in 2015 (UNHCR, 2017a). UNHCR estimates its budget needs for 2015 were 7,232 million dollars but actually they only had 3,295 to spend, which is less than half of that sum. For 2017 the needs are for 7,451 million dollars, of which by now available funds are 1,958 million dollars (UNHCR 2017b). The meaning of this short summary is