EPJ Data Sci. (2018) 7: 22
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0154-8

regular article

Debye–Hückel theory for refugees’ migration

¹ National Center for Remote Sensing, CNRS-L, Beirut, Lebanon
² Beirut Research and Innovation Center, Beirut, Lebanon

^* e-mail: sara.najem@mail.mcgill.ca

Received: 3 February 2018
Accepted: 3 July 2018
Published online: 11 July 2018

Abstract

In this paper, we follow the short-ranged Syrian refugees’ migration to Lebanon as documented by the UNHCR. We propose a model inspired by the Debye–Hückel theory and show that it properly predicts the refugees’ mobility while the gravity model fails. We claim that the interaction between origin cities attenuates and/or extenuates the flux to destinations, and consequently, in analogy with the effective charges of interacting particles in a plasma, these source cities are characterized by effective populations determined by their pairwise remoteness/closeness and defined by areas of control between the fighting parties.