Rapid, unanticipated shifts in migrant flows — whether triggered by conflict, climate-related disasters, or economic pressures — pose acute challenges for governments and humanitarian organizations. Explaining such shifts requires attention to how migration decisions are made. It is well established that migrants seldom decide in isolation, as they draw on information from others in their networks and respond to shared social and institutional cues. Current migration models, however, account for this interdependence only partially, leaving important mechanisms behind observed migration patterns insufficiently captured.

The physics of collective behavior offers a mature and powerful framework for exactly this class of problem. Decades of work on collective motion — in animal groups ranging from foraging ant colonies to locust swarms to schooling fish — have uncovered generalizable principles: bifurcations that reorganize group structure, the constructive role of noise in reducing bias, and the importance of interaction topology in maintaining behavioral flexibility. A key insight is that dynamical fluctuations are signatures, beyond noise, of the underlying decision rules, particularly near phase transitions where small deviations can have outsized and macroscopic consequences.

Despite these parallels, the study of human migration has remained largely disconnected from this literature. This workshop aims to bridge that gap.

Two guiding questions will organize the discussion:

• From microscopic rules to macroscopic outcomes. What generalizable laws govern how individual behavioral rules aggregate into collective patterns? How might those principles reshape the way we model migration decisions and predict migrant flows?
• The role of artificial structures. Human collectives are embedded in institutions, policies, and shared cognitive constructs (e.g., perceptions of popular opinion, slowly evolving cultural norms) that have no direct analogue in animal systems. How do these structures modify, stabilize, or destabilize collective dynamics