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The Afghan migration crisis and U.S. policy

Tsapenko I.P.,

Doctor of Economics, Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Moscow, Russia, tsapenko@imemo.ru

elibrary_id: 72045 | ORCID: 0000-0001-6065-790X | RESEARCHER_ID: B-1993-2017

Article received: 2022.06.08. Accepted: 2022.11.03


DOI: 10.17976/jpps/2023.01.05
EDN: DYEZUX

Rubric: Theme of the issue: The nexus effect in world politics

For citation:

Tsapenko I.P. The Afghan migration crisis and U.S. policy. – Polis. Political Studies. 2023. No. 1. https://doi.org/10.17976/jpps/2023.01.05. EDN: DYEZUX

The reported study was funded by RFBR, project number 20-014-00001 А “Global and Regional Effects of US Economic Policy in the second – the beginning of the third decade of the XXI century: New Challenges and Chances for Russia”.

Abstract

The social dynamics of the modern turbulent world reveals an increasing correlation between migration and crises. This nexus is characterized by the emergence of a large number of migration crises in different parts of the world. Despite the widespread use of the term “migration crisis”, its content has not yet been clearly defined and requires some clarifications. The author proposes an interpretation of the migration crisis as a multidimensional social process, which is caused by the mobility and immobility of the population in abnormal conditions and generates multiple, serious challenges for migrants, people trapped in social and natural disasters, and wider social strata, as well as migration management systems in countries of origin, transit and destination. The Afghan migration crisis turned out to be one of the largest, longest and most acute in the world. As the analysis of the internal and external displacement movements of the population, carried out in line with the crisis approach to mobility, shows, these characteristics of the Afghan crisis are explained by the structural format, the long duration of action, the overlap and mutual reinforcement of a number of factors that generate and feed the inexhaustible forced flows of Afghans, which are often cyclical. The Afghan example testifies to the great importance and, at the same time, the duality of the role of external forces in the course of a migration crisis. Not only the military operations of American troops in Afghanistan, but also the withdrawal of the latter, as well as the subsequent measures of the J. Biden administration, contributed to the aggravation and prolongation of the situation there. Although the presence of the US army was initially accompanied by a surge in the repatriation of refugees and the United States sheltered a small part of the Afghans fleeing war and persecution on its territory, this only slightly contributed to mitigating the consequences of the crisis, without reducing the general destabilizing effect of American policy on the migration situation in Afghanistan and around it.

Keywords

migration crisis, crisis migration, refugee movement, internal displacement, external actors, Afghanistan, USA, military operations, withdrawal of troops, migration policy.

 Full Text

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