Migration and security threats in south-eastern Europe

Abstract

South-eastern Europe is depicted as a highly insecure region owing to a combination of factors including its function as the gateway to the EU and the many socio-economic problems that have arisen out of the democratization process in eastern Europe. The already existing internal differences within south-eastern Europe have been rendered huge by the effects of transition. Migratory flows mirror the complexity of the political and socio-economic conditions in the area. This paper aims to provide an overview of migration trends in south-eastern Europe, with particular emphasis on the security threats they entail.

Keywords:

• economic migrants
• forced migration
• human security
• migration flows
• south-east Europe

Notes

1. See, e.g. the European Neighbourhood Policy, the European Agency for the Management of Operational Co-operation at the External Borders of the member states of the EU (FRONTEX).

2. The terms ‘south-eastern Europe’ and ‘the Balkans’ will be used interchangeably in the text. In this paper south-eastern Europe is understood as comprising a number of state entities: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, FYROM, Greece, Moldavia, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro and Slovenia.

3. This is the number of valid residence permits by March 2010 (Greek Ministry of Interior).

4. See http://www.stat.si/eng/novica_prikazi.aspx?ID=1823.

5. According to the NGO Fortress Europe, 12,920 people died at the borders of Europe between 1998 and 2008. See http://fortresseurope.blospot.com/2006/01/fortress-europe.html.

6. IDPs are those people or groups of individuals who have been forced to leave their homes or places of habitual residence due to armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights and/or natural and human-made disasters and who have not crossed an international border (UNHCR 2009).

7. The data used in this section are taken from UNHCR reports. By 2007 the UNHCR modified its operational definitions for the different categories of concern. More particularly, it expanded the category of refugees to include people who are in refugee-like situations and the category of IDPs to include people who are in IDP-like situations (UNHCR 2007, 15–22).

8. All figures are based on the UNCHR data (see UNCHR 2007, 2008).

9. Data published by the Ministry for Citizen Protection. http://www.astynomia.gr.

10. The definition of human trafficking is provided by the Palermo Protocol (article 3).