Measuring the potential for mass displacement in menacing contexts

Abstract

A menacing context has emerged when a dread threat persists and requires a community to reorganize its life to help mitigate consequences of threat. This article explores how menacing context links drivers of forced migration, the perception of threat among local families and domestic decision-making about remaining in place, fleeing or combinations of both. Employing a coding scheme based on dread threat theory, this article illustrates through case studies of a cholera epidemic, total war setting and a complex situation with infectious disease, civil strife and drought threats how to transform qualitative data from ethnographic, autobiographical and journalistic sources into a quantitative measurement scale of local perception of threat for use in formal modelling, forecasting and potentially enhanced humanitarian responses to mass displacement.