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Paper short abstract

This paper theorises wartime deportations, showing how war and hybrid conflict can legitimise state-organised expulsions. Drawing on deportations and pushbacks from Poland to Ukraine and Belarus, it highlights the importance of the discoursive weaponisation of migrants by the deporting state.

Paper long abstract

War is often analysed as a driver of displacement and asylum, underpinning the principle of non-refoulement. This paper shifts focus to a less-examined dynamic: how war and hybrid conflict can justify deportation. I develop the concept of wartime deportations, understood as state-organised expulsions occurring in the context of conflict. Rather than suspending removal practices, war transforms the political and moral landscape, making deportation thinkable and legitimate.

Drawing on contemporary deportations to Ukraine and pushbacks to Belarus, I show that conflict can reconfigure the legitimacy of removal. Central to wartime deportations is the narrative of the weaponisation of migrants and asylum seekers. When mobility is framed as a hostile act orchestrated by foreign states – such as cross-border arrivals at the EU-Belarus frontier – people are discursively constructed as instruments of geopolitical aggression. A similar logic informed Polish proposals to deport Ukrainian men of conscription age, reframing removal as a contribution to national defence rather than a violation of protection norms. These shifts allow governments to embed deportation within the logic of national survival. Security narratives, appeals to sovereignty, and claims about the “instrumentalisation of migration” create political and discursive conditions under which coercive return is framed as necessary, defensive, and protective of the state.

By theorising deportation through the lens of war, the paper contributes to debates on migration control, sovereignty, and security. It shows that contemporary deportation regimes cannot be understood without considering how geopolitical conflict reshapes humanitarian protection and normalises coercive return as a tool of statecraft.