Countering Weaponized Migration to Central and Eastern Europe

The U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) seeks to support analysis that increases understanding of how malign foreign governments and their proxies weaponize migration to serve their geopolitical ends. Similar to East Germany’s Soviet-backed trafficking of migrants from developing countries into West Germany to stoke social tensions in the 1980s, nefarious state and state-backed criminal actors, seek to lure migrants from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia to Central and Eastern European democracies to weaken and destabilize them. In addition, such nefarious actors exploit or exacerbate conflicts in other regions and channel conflict-affected populations toward Europe. Thus, DRL announces an open competition for proposals for programs to analyze and develop approaches to expose and counter such weaponized migration.