Protest emigration (also called hijrat or deshatyaga in South Asia) is the use of emigration as an activist tactic when it is felt political change is not currently possible inside a jurisdiction. Gene Sharp in The Politics of Nonviolent Action describes this as a form of social noncooperation.[1]
In some traditions, such emigrations have been symbolically analogized to the Hijrah or to the Exodus.
This was a method used against local lords by peasants and lower classes in the secessio plebis of Ancient Rome and in Japan[2] as well as Southeast Asia.[3] Fugitive peasants were a recurring phenomenon under European serfdom. This tactic has also been noted as important to the formation of various pre-colonial African states, as well as a template for later eras.[4]
This featured in several anticolonial and decolonization movements,[5] including in British India, as in the Hijrat of 1920 from North-West Frontier Province to independent Afghanistan associated with Abul Kalam Azad of the Khilafat Movement,[6] and in the 1928 Bardoli Satyagraha and 1930 Salt March operations which included some migrations from Gujarat to the princely Baroda State. Hijrat was a tactic commended several times by Gandhi as appropriate to certain circumstances.[7] This tactic was also proposed but not pursued as a form of resistance to concessions in China. And it was also significant in emigration from French West Africa to the Gold Coast and other colonies of British West Africa.[8]
In a country under strong federalism such as the United States, protest can take the form of an internal migration through foot voting to better individual lives, or in a more utopian mode, to alter the political character of a sub-national state through a directed partisan sorting.