Debye–Huckel theory for refugees’ migration

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.