Laboratory

Migration and Mobility

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

Patterns of Migration and Mobility in Response to International Conflicts and Wars

Asli Ebru Sanlitürk, Athina Anastasiadou, Carolina Coimbra Vieira, Emilio Zagheni; in Collaboration with Francesco C. Billari (Bocconi University, Milan, Italy), Artem Volgin (The University of Manchester, United Kingdom), Douglas Leasure (University of Oxford, United Kingdom)

Detailed Description

International armed conflicts and wars often trigger massive and unexpected migration flows. In such contexts, it becomes imperative to understand the scale and the characteristics of the people on the move in order to organize effective humanitarian relief and policy responses. However, reliable real-time data on the people fleeing conflicts and wars are often scarce due to the practical and ethical challenges of conducting field work during these crises. Forced migrants therefore constitute one of the hardest to reach populations in migration research.

This project pursues two main goals. First, it integrates novel digital data sources into forced displacement research and demonstrates their predictive power in estimating unexpected mass migration patterns. Second, it uses digital trace data to shed light on the onward migration trajectories of forced migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees after their arrival in the first host country. Data on the peri-migration stage, as well as on the early post-arrival period in the host country, are critical yet scarce. While these data are urgently needed, they are often hard to obtain until more detailed and well-designed surveys can be conducted. By repurposing digital trace data, this project helps bridge this gap and provide insights into displacement patterns, migrant characteristics, and decision-making processes.

This project leverages data from platforms like Google Trends, Yandex Keyword Statistics, and Wikipedia, and examines three main case studies: the Mediterranean refugee crisis after the Syrian civil war, the exodus of Ukrainian refugees following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the exodus of Russian nationals after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The study on the Syrian civil war analyzes the potential of using Google Trends data to predict the stock of Syrians across Turkish provinces. Our findings show that the use of online search data is advantageous for predicting the changing patterns of migrant stocks at frequent time intervals (weekly or monthly), as these data outperform conventional socioeconomic indicators limited by less frequent reporting periods. A second study leverages data from Yandex Keyword Statistics to analyze the outmigration of Russian nationals after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our findings indicate a divergence in online search behavior in the two waves of Russian outmigration, with early post-invasion searches oriented toward Western countries, likely reflecting the higher socioeconomic backgrounds of individuals with visa access. However, during the post-mobilization period, increased interest in visa- and passport-free countries as target destinations is observed. Finally, in a third study, we investigate the potential of using Wikipedia page views in the forced displacement context of Ukrainian refugees. Our findings show a strong correlation between the views of Ukrainian-language Wikipedia articles of destinations in Europe and temporary protection applications, as well as increasing searches for Polish cities after border crossings. These results suggest that refugees’ decision-making processes regarding their target destination likely continued after they entered a safe territory.

Overall, this project demonstrates the analytical value of using digital trace data to study forced displacement events, thereby contributing to the forced migration literature and supporting humanitarian and policy responses. Future research will further extend this approach to other data-scarce contexts.

Publications

Coimbra Vieira, C.; Şanlitürk, A. E.; Zagheni, E.:

Forced migration and information seeking behavior on Wikipedia: insights from the Ukrainian refugee crisis

In: Proceedings of the 20th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-26): Los Angeles, CA, USA, May 27–29, 2026, 2358–2381. Washington, DC: AAAI Press. (2026)    

Şanlitürk, A. E.; Billari, F. C.:

Search for a new home: refugee stock and Google search

International Migration Review 59:1, 61–89. (2025)    

Anastasiadou, A.; Volgin, A.; Leasure, D. R.:

War and mobility: using Yandex web searches to characterize intentions to leave Russia after its invasion of Ukraine

Demographic Research 50:8, 205–220. (2024)