In northern Uganda, gentle hills occasionally punctuate a vast savannah teeming with crops of cassava and sorghum. During the 1990s and early 2000s, a rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) roamed the countryside, raiding villages and ambushing military and police outposts. Local residents became accustomed to fleeing their homes at a moment’s notice. They did so spontaneously and fleetingly, hiding in the bush for a day or staying in nearby towns for a week, waiting for the insurgents to move on before they returned home. But then the government began to order people to leave their villages and relocate to designated camps; camps where conditions often bordered on the grotesque. Daniel, who I met in Uganda in 2016, recalls walking to a camp with his mother and brother, carrying a few precious belongings.Footnote 1 They arrived to find hundreds of people packed together in small huts made of reed, mud, and grass. “The sanitation was awful, and there was not enough food,” Daniel told me.
When many people ignored the order to relocate, the army issued an ultimatum. “They said that civilians should come to the camps. Anybody found in the villages would be presumed to be a rebel collaborator and shot.” A few days later, the army began to bomb villages. The displacement camps multiplied and swelled from hundreds to thousands of people, eventually triggering what the United Nations (UN) would call the world’s most underreported humanitarian crisis.Footnote 2 It would be years before Daniel returned to his village. “Home became a forgotten place,” he said.
I heard similar stories in dozens of communities as I made my way through northern Uganda. What happened to Daniel, his family, and his neighbors was not unique; nor was Uganda an idiosyncratic case. In various countries affected by civil wars, armed actors have routinely engaged in strategic displacement, intentionally and coercively uprooting civilians in pursuit of political and military objectives. How do we characterize these strategies? What motivates them? And what are the conditions under which combatants are likely to employ them? To shed light on these questions, this book shows how displacement is often used to sort and identify, rather than expel and eliminate, the local population. This is important for better understanding the motivations behind forced displacement and its consequences.
Such an understanding has become more urgent than ever. Wars today kill thousands but displace millions. Between 2013 and 2023, the number of individuals uprooted by conflict and violence more than doubled, reaching a staggering 117 million – the highest recorded since World War II.Footnote 3 Movements of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) have important implications for international security due to their potential to spread violence within and across borders, generate humanitarian crises, and undermine prospects for post-conflict peace and development.Footnote 4 Refugee and IDP situations typically last years, if not decades, and when people eventually return, it can aggravate political rivalries, increase economic competition, and generate tensions over property rights and access to public goods. Thus in many societies – from the French Huguenots of the sixteenth century to Ukrainians and Syrians today – displacement has been an enduring and transformative force. The political repercussions of displacement are also increasingly evident. Refugees have become a salient domestic issue in many countries; one seized on by populist politicians to help win elections in the US and Europe. And the human toll of displacement is incalculable. “To be rooted,” observed the French philosopher Simone Weil, “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” To be displaced, then, is to experience the utmost deprivation – of property, of community, of livelihood – that leaves indelible scars on individuals and societies.
The deportation, transfer, and resettlement of populations has been a feature of territorial acquisition, military domination, and colonial settlement since antiquity. In the context of civil wars, migration is sometimes conceived as an inadvertent (and perhaps inevitable) byproduct of violence and instability. Fighting erupts. People flee. But population displacement is a strategy of warfare, not just a consequence of it. Generating civilian flight can be integral, rather than incidental, to the tactics and practices of armed groups.
When combatants do uproot civilians, there is a tendency in the media, among policymakers, and even by scholars to characterize these events as “ethnic cleansing.” As such, the expulsion of members of ethnic, religious, and other identity groups has been the subject of considerable research. But should we treat the encampment of civilians in Uganda as a similar phenomenon to the expulsion of ethnic Rohingya from Myanmar or the displacement of Massalit communities by armed militias in Darfur, Sudan? Cleansing is only one type of displacement, and it is not necessarily the most common one. While combatants uprooted civilians in 64 percent of major civil wars between 1945 and 2017, cleansing accounted for just one-third of cases.Footnote 5 Strategic displacement can take multiple forms, so there is a need to distinguish different types and compare where they occur to understand why they are used.
This book introduces new data on population displacement strategies in civil wars and identifies variation within and across conflicts in the use of three types: the cleansing of political or ethnic groups, the depopulation of designated areas, and the forced relocation of civilians into new dwellings. Using multiple research methods and sources, including a new cross-national dataset and extensive fieldwork in Uganda, Syria, and Turkey, I propose a new theory of strategic displacement by state actors, who I find are the predominant perpetrators. Observers tend to assume that displacement is intended to remove or punish civilians. I argue that it is often pursued in order to sort, and extract resources from, the targeted population. This is particularly important for understanding the logic behind a frequent yet relatively understudied type of strategic displacement: forced relocation, which is the main focus of this book. The ensuing pages therefore provide new conceptual, theoretical, and empirical insights into a devastating form of political violence – and challenges some common beliefs about its use.
Given the tremendous human and financial costs of population displacement, it is vital to understand its underlying drivers. Doing so, however, requires examining not only why people decide to flee conflict but also why conflict parties want them to flee. This book is therefore critical for advancing our knowledge of wartime displacement, untangling the dynamics of conflict, and improving policy efforts to manage one of the most pressing challenges facing humanity today.
1.1 The Argument
The preoccupation with ethnic cleansing promotes the perception that the primary function of strategic displacement is to expel “undesirable” groups or to punish troublesome elements of the population. I argue that combatants, particularly state combatants, often use displacement to sort the civilian population, not to get rid of it. Triggering civilian flight can reveal information about the affiliations and allegiances of the population, which combatants need to effectively target enemy fighters and deter support for them. Civil wars entail a high degree of uncertainty, and this information is often lacking. As a result, armed groups frequently rely on simplifying heuristics, or clues, to infer opponents’ identities and civilians’ loyalties. Previous research has shown that cleansing can be a consequence of this practice: If combatants use heuristics such as ethnic identity or political party affiliation to distinguish enemies from allies, they will target members of these groups and seek their expulsion.Footnote 6
But what if such heuristics are unavailable – because, for instance, opposing forces do not claim a distinct ethnic identity – or unhelpful, because a population is either too homogenous or too heterogeneous for ethnicity to be a meaningful distinguishing trait? In these contexts, instead of engaging in ethnic or racial profiling, information-starved and resource-constrained combatants may resort to spatial profiling. Civil wars are characterized by a fragmentation of domestic sovereignty, and civilian collaboration with armed actors both shapes, and is shaped by, their control over territory.Footnote 7 This often causes political identities to become territorialized, as particular places are associated with a particular side. People’s physical locations and movements can then provide clues regarding their loyalties and affiliations. Armed actors may therefore use human mobility to infer wartime sympathies through what I call guilt by location.
This theory is primarily applicable to forced relocation, which I find is the most common displacement strategy. Ordering people to move to a designed area forces them to send signals of association and allegiance based on whether, and to where, they flee. Civilians can comply and relocate, or defect by remaining in contested territory – or by moving to areas controlled by the other side. Because defection is costly and highly visible, it sends a credible and easily observable signal of disloyalty to perpetrators. However, since people can falsify their allegiances, complying with orders to move is necessary, but not sufficient, to cast off suspicions of disloyalty. Relocation allows perpetrators to weed out enemies both through the initial process of flight and by making those who comply more accessible and “legible”; it is easier to “see” the population in a more concentrated and regimented space. This enables armed groups to (1) use people’s movements and locations as a continuous indicator of affiliation; and (2) extract rents and recruits from a larger segment of the population. Thus, while cleansing aims to remove undesirable or disloyal populations, forced relocation – and in some cases, depopulation – seek to identify the undesirables or the disloyal in the first place.
To be clear: Civilians’ movement decisions may not always reflect their actual loyalties, just as ethnic or religious identity may be poor indicators of people’s allegiances. But combatants typically perceive the actions of civilians to be political in wartime, even when they are not intended to be. This argument draws on a core insight from the study of conflict – that violence is often shaped by the level of information available to armed actors – to deepen our understanding of the logic of forced displacement, one of the most consequential features of modern warfare. While I concur with prior research claiming that information problems drive combatants to displace, I show that different types of strategic displacement reflect different responses to these problems, serve different functions, and are employed in different contexts. Cleansing is an outcome of state combatants identifying potential enemies ex ante, and is more likely where counterinsurgents seek territory and have access to group-level identifiers that link civilians to rebel groups. Forced relocation, however, is a process that combatants use to identify their opponents ex post, and is more likely when counterinsurgents seek information but lack group-level identifiers. Moreover, contrary to conventional wisdom, I show that strategies of forced relocation are used not just to demobilize or immobilize noncombatants. They are also used to mobilize them for military purposes.
Unlike existing work, this book stresses the role of displacement not as a means of eliminating or punishing the population but rather as a method of gathering information about, and extorting resources from, its members. The assortative aspect of displacement has been largely overlooked in previous research. These logics do not account for every case, and they are not the only factors that motivate these strategies. There is no single explanation for why armed groups displace people. But this book uses multiple social science methods, from statistical analysis to interviews and case studies, to provide direct and indirect evidence for these logics and demonstrate that they can (1) help explain the use of particular displacement strategies, namely forced relocation, and (2) help account for variation in strategic displacement across cases. The results challenge common explanations by showing that different types of conflicts exhibit different strategies of displacement, and that combatants often uproot the population not just to “drain the sea” – a popular counterinsurgency metaphor for depriving rebels of civilian support – but also to divide and map the sea. Moreover, the analysis underscores the extent to which displacement can be an expressive act. This has important academic and policy implications. Scholars and practitioners need to give greater attention to the politics of civilian flight in order to explain wartime displacement and develop effective interventions to address its myriad consequences.
1.2 Clarifying Terms and Scope
1.2.1 The Context: Civil Wars
Population displacement occurs in a wide range of contexts and can be driven by a variety of factors, including war and colonization, state repression and intercommunal violence, and natural disasters, economic development, and climate change. Yet armed conflict has been the greatest generator of displaced people in the modern era.Footnote 8 This includes refugees, who cross an international border to seek sanctuary in another state, and internally displaced persons, who remain within their countries.
This book focuses exclusively on a particular form of conflict: civil wars, in which fighting between state actors and nonstate groups kills at least 1,000 people.Footnote 9 Since World War II, wars waged within states have become the principal mode of large-scale conflict across the globe. Forty percent of all UN member countries experienced a civil war during this period, and 20 percent suffered from multiple ones. Civil wars have generated far more deaths and displacement than wars between countries. In fact, scholars tend to attribute the rise in displacement since the 1960s to the shift in global conflict from interstate to intrastate, as the latter are typically waged within civilian population centers and are therefore prone to provoking mass flight.Footnote 10
Thus, while the arguments developed in this volume could possibly help explain population displacement strategies in wars between states, I do not include these cases in my analysis. My focus on civil war displacement also excludes organized population movements in response to natural disasters or economic development projects, or as part of settler colonialism or state-building.Footnote 11 It also distinguishes this book from research on mass deportation and ethnic cleansing during interstate wars and foreign policy disputes.Footnote 12 This distinction is important because global trends in forced displacement suggests that the deliberate expulsion of people outside state borders has become less prevalent than the uprooting of civilians within their countries, as IDPs now make up roughly two-thirds of the globally displaced population. In 2023 the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported 27.2 million new displacementss due to conflict and violence, three-quarters of them were uprooted within their countries as IDPs.Footnote 13 As such, understanding why combatants would attempt to displace people internally rather than externally is of particular relevance.
1.2.2 The Weapon: Displacement
Scholars and human rights practitioners have demonstrated that displacement can be a distinctive strategy employed by armed groups – not just an auxiliary outcome of other conflict dynamics – and therefore requires an explanation within itself. While research on armed conflict and political violence has been dominated by the study of homicides, scholars have increasingly stressed the importance of analyzing nonlethal forms of violence in order to better understand the dynamics and consequences of war. No form of violence affects more people than displacement. Between 1989 and 2017 alone, more than ninety million people were uprooted by civil wars, dwarfing the number of people killed in them (1.62 million).Footnote 14 Given these trends, examining wartime displacement in isolation is essential.
Of course, not all displacement in wartime is deliberately induced by combatants. Civilians residing in conflict zones often decide to spontaneously leave their homes due to fear of violence or economic hardship caused by the war, or because they live in close proximity to military front lines. The distinction between intentional and unintentional displacement has often been noted by conflict analysts:
In contexts where civilians are suffering from generalized violence triggered by conflict, rather than displacement being a planned strategy by the belligerents, populations may spontaneously flee.Footnote 15
In Turkey and Burma, governments have deliberately uprooted people in order to destroy their possible links to insurgency movements. In Algeria, displacement is a byproduct of conflict, primarily between the government and Islamist insurgent groups.Footnote 16
Strategic displacement refers to deliberate, systematic displacement that is carried out through physical coercive actions under the direction or encouragement of armed group leadership. This is based on the criminal definition of displacement promulgated by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which includes “the forced removal of people from one country” or “from one area to another within the same state,” typically as part of a “widespread or systematic attack” against a civilian population.Footnote 17 Such measures are explicitly prohibited by international law, under both the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions (Article 17) and the Rome Statute (Article 7).Footnote 18 Verdicts delivered by international tribunals have further established that forced displacement can be a war crime.Footnote 19
Just as wartime displacement is not necessarily intentional, intentional displacement is not necessarily strategic. Combatants may also uproot civilians for private reasons – to loot or expropriate their property – without receiving direct orders.Footnote 20 I consider such instances opportunistic displacement and therefore distinct from displacement that is ordered as part of a strategy and displacement that is unintentional (or collateral damage). Displacement becomes strategic when it is purposefully adopted by an armed group as a matter of organizational policy in pursuit of military objectives. Perpetrators may use a variety of tactics to induce displacement, from direct orders, threats, and intimidation; to massacres and physical abuse; to arbitrary bombing, shelling, and property destruction. Victims usually flee on foot and sometimes by vehicle. In some instances, perpetrators transport people en masse using buses or trains, but this tends to be relatively rare.
There are three primary types of strategic displacement, which are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2. Cleansing describes the permanent expulsion of individuals who belong to a particular political, ethnic, religious, or other identity group. These methods obtained notoriety in the 1990s during the war in Bosnia, but they have been used more recently in Cameroon and South Sudan, and against the Rohingya in Myanmar. Depopulation, which the Russian military used in Grozny during the wars in Chechnya, is the indiscriminate and temporary evacuation of particular geographic areas. Forced relocation refers to the concentration or resettlement of civilians in makeshift camps or proximate urban centers. The use of strategic hamlets in Vietnam and model villages during the Guatemalan civil war are two well-known examples. While cleansing and depopulation focus on trying to get people to leave – through either group-selective targeting (cleansing) or indiscriminate violence (depopulation) – relocation dictates where they should go. Although some scholars have drawn distinctions between displacement that seeks to cleanse a population and displacement aimed at controlling it, they have yet to systematically capture and compare the use of these different strategies across civil wars.Footnote 21 This is crucial for testing and refining different arguments for why combatants displace people.
To be clear: The arguments in this book are meant to help explain displacement strategies other than cleansing. I therefore focus on strategies of forced relocation – which, as I show in Chapter 2, has been the most prevalent type of strategic displacement in the modern period. However, I also explore potential extensions of my argument to strategies of depopulation through a case study of the civil war in Syria.Footnote 22
1.2.3 The Perpetrators: State Actors
My definition of strategic wartime displacement covers displacement by armed groups, including state agents (military, police, and paramilitary organizations) and nonstate actors (rebel groups or independent militias). However, this study focuses on displacement by state agents (i.e., counterinsurgents) for several reasons. First, civil war incumbents are much more likely to employ these methods than insurgents. According to the cross-national data I collected for this book – which I introduce in detail in Chapter 2 – state actors have employed strategic displacement in 60 percent of civil wars, while rebels have only displaced in 20 percent of conflicts. This is likely because states tend to possess the firepower, organizational capabilities, and logistical resources needed to facilitate mass population movements. Nonstate actors typically have fewer resources and are therefore less likely to engage in these practices. Moreover, the use of some displacement strategies, namely forced relocation – in which civilians are moved to a designated area – presupposes that the perpetrator controls some territory. State actors meet this criterion by definition. Insurgents, however, often do not: According to data on the military capabilities of 569 rebel groups active between 1946 and 2010, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) did not effectively control any territory.Footnote 23
Second, most of the theories tested in this book stem from research on state-induced displacement and may apply mainly, if not exclusively, to government combatants. For example, some arguments – including my own – claim that strategic displacement is motivated by identification problems. This would make these strategies more appealing to counterinsurgents. Most states field uniformed militaries that broadcast their presence and clearly distinguish themselves from noncombatants. Insurgents, consequently, know who they are fighting. In contrast, rebels usually try to blend in with the population; their very survival depends on blurring the combatant–civilian distinction. In fact, to maintain their cover, rebel groups – from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone, to the Taliban in Afghanistan, to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – often engage in the forced emplacement of civilians, preventing people from fleeing their communities so they can serve as human shields. Although rebels can face identification problems in wartime, they tend to be less acute than those encountered by state combatants. It is because of the fact that governments tend to suffer disproportionally from these problems that my arguments, and the analysis in this book, focus on state actors.
In sum, given differences in the strategic incentives and organizational resources available to state and nonstate actors, civil war incumbents will be more likely to engage in strategic displacement. The logics behind rebel-induced displacement may also differ from those discussed in this book. Indeed, research on insurgent violence suggests that, since rebel groups are more likely to engage in predation, most of the civilian displacement they cause will be opportunistic or occur as a byproduct of looting.Footnote 24 It is possible that my arguments could help explain displacement by rebels in some instances, but this merits further exploration that is beyond the scope of this study.
1.3 What We Know about Displacement
This book sits at the intersection of two fields of research: the study of forced migration, and the study of conflict and political violence. I build on insights from both of these literatures to develop the ideas and arguments presented in this book.
1.3.1 Research on Forced Migration
In refugee and forced migration studies, research on the causes of wartime displacement has focused on people’s decisions to flee violence. Scholars have either examined macro-level trends in refugee and IDP flows,Footnote 25 or they have conducted micro-level studies that draw on traditional migration theories to show that different “push” and “pull” factors influence whether and to where civilians in conflict zones flee.Footnote 26 Concerns about security and livelihoods, along with social networks, economic assets, and political preferences, can motivate or enable people to flee – or encourage them to remain in their communities.
This research has established a clear link between violence and displacement and uncovered different factors that can influence wartime flight. Since the forced migration literature tends to make displaced people the focus of its analysis, it has paid little attention to how combatants strategically engineer displacement. Still, it has been instrumental in demonstrating that, since individuals exercise agency in wartime, fleeing often involves an interplay between compulsion and choice. The distinction between “voluntary” and “involuntary” migration is typically thought to represent opposing ends on a continuum. Yet as David Turton observes, “even at the most ‘reactive’ or ‘involuntary’ end of the continuum, people probably have a lot more choice than we might think … choices not only about whether but also about when, where, and how to move.”Footnote 27 By demonstrating that displacement is neither inevitable nor monotonic, this literature provides a foundation for incorporating civilian agency into theories of displacement – including intentional, combatant-induced displacement.
1.3.2 Research on Conflict and Political Violence
Research on conflict and political violence addresses more directly the strategic and tactical dimensions of civilian displacement in civil wars. Most studies explore the use of violence against civilians generally, and offer crucial insights into combatants’ behavior and strategic calculations. Two subsets of this literature have focused specifically on displacement.
The first is research on ethnic cleansing. These studies attribute strategic displacement to ethnic nationalism and elite aspirations to remove “undesirable” social groups and create homogenous territories.Footnote 28 Some scholars focus on the pre-war domestic socio-political environment to identify foundational narratives and cross-cutting cleavages that can enable or prevent ethnic cleansing following the outbreak of civil conflict.Footnote 29 Yet as I pointed out earlier, ethnic cleansing is only one type of strategic displacement. These explanations, while indispensable for fully understanding ethnic mass violence, cannot account for displacement that does not target a particular ethno-nationalist group.
A second strand of research comes from the study of counterinsurgency. Drawing on new frameworks for explaining wartime violence, this research departs from macro- and micro-level explanations and recasts displacement as the result of an interaction between combatants and civilians. Under this approach, displacement is a rational response to a central problem combatants face in civil wars: a lack of information about the identities of opposing fighters and their supporters, which prevents armed groups from coercing and deterring support for the other side.Footnote 30 Scholars have proposed two different but non-mutually exclusive logics linking this “identification problem” to displacement.
Some propose a logic of denial, which focuses on interdiction.Footnote 31 In this view, since combatants cannot distinguish allies from enemies, they remove some or all of the population from an area to deprive enemy fighters of civilian support.Footnote 32 According to Mao Zedong’s famous analogy, rebels intent on challenging the state tend to swim among civilians like fish in water, relying on them for food, shelter, recruits, and other supplies. For counterinsurgents, uprooting the population therefore “drains the sea” and starves the fish.
Other researchers suggest that displacement amounts to a form of collective punishment. When armed groups lack information about individual loyalties, they turn to group-level indicators, such as ethnic or political affiliation, to identify and expel potential adversaries. Removing the disloyal makes it easier to control territory and can inflict enough pain on civilians that it compels rebels to make concessions.Footnote 33 In Lebanon, Nils Hägerdal finds that non-coethnic enclaves were susceptible to ethnic cleansing because combatants had little choice but to use ethnicity as a proxy for political loyalty.Footnote 34 Abbey Steele shows that even nonethnic conflicts can produce political cleansing when combatants use election results to infer support for armed rivals.Footnote 35 These studies indicate similarities between ethnic and nonethnic cleansing, though other research indicates that ethnic cleansing is unique due to ethnicity’s distinct territoriality.Footnote 36
These arguments make sense, and they have produced exemplary research that has been critical to understanding strategic displacement. Yet they largely derive from studies of specific conflicts and have yet to be tested more broadly, limiting their generalizability. Moreover, their explanatory reach is limited in several ways. First, these logics cannot on their own account for why combatants use different displacement strategies. As other scholars have pointed out, strategic arguments for violence against civilians often focus on explaining the level of violence and the method of targeting but are agnostic about the form that violence takes.Footnote 37 Denial and collective punishment have been motivating factors in cases of cleansing, depopulation, and forced relocation, so it is unclear why we observe different types of strategic displacement.
Relatedly, these arguments shed little light on why combatants opt for displacement over other methods. The logic of “draining the sea” has also been used to explain mass killing of civilians in civil wars.Footnote 38 What, then, is the utility of uprooting people versus massacring them? The relationship between strategies of mass killing and mass displacement is unclear, as some studies treat them as complements, while others claim that displacement is a more palatable and deniable alternative to killing civilians.Footnote 39 But there is little empirical evidence to support the assertion that displacement is a substitute for lethal violence. Moreover, as with mass killing, uprooting civilians can have significant reputational costs for perpetrators. The prohibition against population expulsion and forced resettlement under international law – along with the creation of legal and institutional frameworks to protect displaced people – have created strong norms against inducing displacement. Scores of displaced civilians tend to attract significant attention from journalists, humanitarian agencies, and human rights observers, and armed groups have routinely faced criticism for forcing people to flee. Yet this does not seem to have changed combatants’ willingness to engage in these practices.
A final weakness of denial- and punishment-based arguments is that, while they attribute displacement to identification problems, they do not explain whether – and how – displacement actually helps resolve them. Denial focuses on crippling the enemy through interdiction, not identification. Collective punishment assumes everyone (or everyone in a particular group) is guilty and expels them. The link between information and displacement must be explained, not assumed. After all, draining the sea of water to starve the fish suggests that one can distinguish between the water and the fish in the first place.Footnote 40 If counterinsurgents’ aim in triggering displacement is to control a population rather than to eliminate it, addressing this ambiguity is crucial because, as Daniel Magruder argues, resolving the identification problem “comes logically prior” to establishing control.Footnote 41 How, exactly, can uprooting civilians accomplish this?
1.3.3 Civilian Agency
To fully account for the potential utility of displacement as a conflict strategy – and explain why combatants would relocate rather than expel civilians, despite the costs – we need a theory that focuses on the functions that uprooting populations serve beyond “draining the sea.” This book argues that displacement can offer a broader set of benefits to perpetrators; ones that strategies such as mass killing do not. In developing my arguments, I seek to rectify one of the main problems with the “draining the sea” logic: It grants little agency to civilians. Displacement is portrayed as a “brute force” method that denies choices to targeted individuals.Footnote 42 This oversimplifies the realities of displacement and conflicts with a growing scholarly consensus that while civilians operate under significant constraints during armed conflicts, they still select from a broad repertoire of possible actions.Footnote 43 Even passive acts such as compliance entail agency. I therefore heed Kristian Harpviken’s call to “reinsert agency into the study of war-related migration” and treat the displaced as “conscious and capable actors.”Footnote 44 This provides a useful lens for thinking more deeply about how strategic displacement works, why it is used, and the impact it has on conflict dynamics.
There is a wealth of evidence that in wartime, civilians regularly defy the orders and commands of armed groups.Footnote 45 This includes campaigns of forced displacement, which often leave room for victims to comply or defect. To wit: When the Portuguese enacted a large-scale “villagization” (forced relocation) program in colonial Mozambique, many civilians “resisted being villagised from the outset … whole communities fled and allegedly joined the rebels.”Footnote 46 During the Shifta war in Kenya, the government implemented a similar program, and despite coercive pressure, nearly half of the population targeted for relocation “chose to remain outside of villages.”Footnote 47 In Guatemala, when indigenous communities were ordered to relocate in “model villages” by the army, they “responded in three ways: (1) leaving the country for safety in Mexico; (2) turning themselves over to the military to become part of the ‘model village’ population; and (3) remaining in the country either in urban areas or in regions not controlled by the army.”Footnote 48
In Papua New Guinea, despite efforts by the military to force civilians to move into so-called care centers during the war in Bougainville, “many of those displaced … elected to live in the jungle rather than be evacuated” to the centers.Footnote 49 Some Tigrayan peasants in Ethiopia also resisted orders by government soldiers to relocate, opting instead “to walk for four to six weeks across the Sudanese border, rather than seek relief in government held towns, two or three hours away.”Footnote 50 When the army in Mali created “relocation zones” during the Tuareg rebellion, it left local residents “with the choice between complying [and moving to the zones] or risking their lives by staying,” and despite the risks, “many [civilians] resisted arbitrary relocation.”Footnote 51 In the Vietnam War, after South Vietnamese forces attempted to congregate residents of the countryside into strategic hamlets, observers noted that “many managed to escape movement” to hamlets.Footnote 52 Even in the most organized and brutally coercive relocation campaigns, compliance is not uniform. Consider the Boer War, when British imperial forces herded civilians into concentration camps:
Some followed a nomadic existence … Fugitives in mountains, caves, and reed-covered rivers, they desperately evaded the grasp of British columns. Others congregated voluntarily in nearby towns seeking shelter in churches, schools, and abandoned townhomes. Still others remained defiant, staying on the veld or in burned-out farms until the British military collected and forcibly evacuated them.Footnote 53
These are just some examples that illustrate how civilians resist combatants’ efforts to induce and control their movements in war. To be sure, the degree of agency that people exercise varies considerably within and across conflicts. My arguments may be less useful for understanding strategic displacement in cases where people’s mobility choices are highly circumscribed. Generally, however, civilian agency should be taken seriously. When combatants order the population to flee, they rarely possess the ability to completely control its movements. Stylized accounts of mass engineered displacement typically come from Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or Western colonial powers, where soldiers physically loaded people onto trains bound for deportation centers and concentration camps. Yet these operations took place under powerful totalitarian regimes or imperial powers that exerted tight control over their territories and subjects. Civil wars, by contrast, tend to occur in weak states that are unable to dominate their societies. A civil war also means that the state has lost its monopoly not only over the use of force but also over the regulation of the movement of people within and across its borders.Footnote 54 In many cases, this leaves some room for civilians to exercise discretion over their mobility, which can complicate efforts by others to control it. People may eventually have little choice but to leave – because, for example, their entire village is burned to the ground – but they still retain agency in deciding where to go and when. Chapter 3 discusses these options in more detail.
This book focuses on combatants’ motivations for orchestrating displacement, not civilians’ responses to it. Yet if displacement, like other forms of civil war violence, is jointly produced by combatants and civilians, then explanations for it should take the agency of both parties into consideration. This is important for establishing the scope conditions of my theory – the book’s claims are less likely to apply to all-powerful militaries capable of dominating the population – and because I expect combatants to be aware of their limitations in deciding what strategies to use.
1.4 The Evidence
Existing studies of strategic displacement focus on post-war Europe, colonial counterinsurgency campaigns, and the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. This book examines evidence from a large number of cases – including in-depth analysis of conflicts in post-independence Africa, Asia, and the Middle East – and uses a variety of research methods and data sources to test my arguments alongside other explanations. Testing these arguments poses considerable challenges. Inherent in observational research, there are potential measurement and selection problems at work. I seek to ameliorate these concerns by examining a diverse set of observable implications and by mixing quantitative and qualitative research at different levels of analysis.
I begin the rest of the book in Chapter 2 by laying its conceptual and empirical foundations. In Section 2.1, I unpack the “black box” of wartime displacement and differentiate between displacement due to collateral damage and displacement that is deliberately induced by combatants for opportunistic or strategic reasons. I then describe the three primary types of strategic displacement – cleansing, depopulation, and forced relocation – and how they vary in orientation, targeting, and duration. Section 2.3 introduces a new dataset on population displacement strategies in 166 civil wars in 80 countries between 1945 and 2017. The Strategic Displacement in Civil Conflict (SDCC) dataset provides the most comprehensive and disaggregated information on cross-national variation in displacement strategies to date. The dataset serves both descriptive and explanatory purposes. It shows that strategic displacement has been much more common in civil wars than previously thought, and reveals important patterns in how, where, and when these strategies have been employed – which can be leveraged to explain why they occur.
Chapter 3 develops the main argument of the book. I posit that some displacement strategies – namely forced relocation – act as a mechanism for sorting the population. The argument focuses on how the territorialization of political identity in civil wars and the tendency for combatants to utilize informational shortcuts impels them to use relocation to identify opponents through guilt by location. I also show that relocation can help create “zones of appropriation” that facilitate the mobilization of the population into the war effort, without requiring combatants to invest in resource-intensive methods of territorial occupation. To demonstrate the logic and plausibility of each aspect of my argument, I provide illustrative evidence from a wide range of civil wars. The chapter discusses a set of hypotheses and observable implications of my theory.
1.4.1 Methods and Cases
To evaluate my arguments, the empirical approach of the book strikes a balance between in-depth case studies informed by field research and cross-national comparative analysis. In Chapter 4, I use the SDCC dataset to examine cross-national evidence for my theory. I focus the statistical analysis on instances of cleansing and forced relocation because the number of cases of depopulation is too small to draw reliable conclusions. I also evaluate the observable implications of several alternative explanations for state-induced displacement, including ethnic nationalism, rebel threat/desperation, and collective punishment. The analysis in this chapter is not meant to be a definitive test of these explanations, and it cannot fully arbitrate between different logics. Yet it can provide suggestive evidence by revealing important patterns. If different displacement strategies serve different functions, then they should be employed under different conditions. Moreover, if certain strategies – namely, forced relocation – are used as a sorting mechanism, then we should expect them to occur in particular contexts. This chapter therefore provides an indirect test of my arguments by identifying factors associated with the use of different displacement strategies across conflicts.
In Chapters 5 and 6, I shift the analysis from macro-level trends to the micro-level processes of assortative displacement, focusing on case studies of forced relocation. Rather than evaluating the implications of my theory through cross-national comparisons, I look for direct evidence of the logics underlying it in specific cases. Chapter 5 features a detailed case study from Uganda, which offers an ideal research venue for two reasons. First, it exhibits a high degree of variation in state-induced relocation. The Ugandan government faced a series of armed rebellions from 1986 to 2006, and it forcibly relocated civilians while fighting some rebel groups but not others. By exploiting within-case variation in the location and timing of relocation by the same government, I am able to conduct a structured, controlled comparative analysis. Potential confounding factors related to the country and the regime are held constant. Unlike prior studies – which have mostly explored subnational variation in strategic displacement within a single conflict – this context allows me to examine variation across multiple rebellions.
Second, Uganda provides a unique setting for researching civil war dynamics and retracing the use of population displacement due to an unusual openness about this subject among government officials and citizens. Investigating these topics can be logistically difficult and politically sensitive. But the time that has elapsed since these conflicts occurred, along with the use of blanket amnesties for rebels, the mass demobilization of combatants, and the generally open political environment all made it possible for former fighters, authorities, and civilians to recount their experiences with candor. During six months of fieldwork, I interviewed hundreds of perpetrators, victims, and observers of displacement, including state officials, military commanders, rank-and-file soldiers, militia members, human rights activists, journalists, nongovernmental organization (NGO) officials, and local government, tribal, and religious leaders. I therefore join other scholars who have relied on interviews with perpetrators to evaluate the logics underlying wartime violence.Footnote 55 Some readers may be skeptical of this approach due to the possibility of perpetrators concealing their aims and motivations. Yet as Jutta Bakonyi and Berit Bliesemann De Guevara have pointed out, examining the perceptions and interpretations of those who perpetuate violent acts can “enable a deeper understanding of motives and meanings of violence.”Footnote 56
In addition to interviews, I collected a wealth of information from state and media archives in Uganda, including parliamentary meeting minutes where authorities discussed displacement, local security reports, military records, radio transcripts, newspaper articles, and reports from humanitarian and human rights NGOs. Drawing on these data, Chapter 5 combines within-country comparisons of forced relocation across time and space with detailed process tracing of authorities’ decisions to employ it.
Chapter 6 provides additional evidence for my sorting theory in a broader set of contexts. In order to demonstrate that the findings from Chapter 5 generalize beyond Uganda – and can account for the empirical associations found in Chapter 4 – I conduct “shadow” case studies of three civil wars from the SDCC dataset that experienced forced relocation. Shadow cases examine elements of a causal process through a survey of the secondary literature to assess claims of generalizability.Footnote 57 The three case studies are Burundi (1991–2005), the Aceh conflict in Indonesia (1999–2005), and Vietnam (1960–1975). These cases were selected for both methodological and practical reasons. They occur in different regions, different time periods, and different cultural, historical, economic, and geopolitical contexts. The insurgencies also vary by type (ethnic versus Marxist) and objective (government takeover versus secession). Compared to the Uganda case, the rebel groups fighting the state when it relocated civilians in these three cases were more popular, larger in number, and stronger in capabilities. My case selection strategy therefore follows a diverse case study design.Footnote 58
Because shadow cases rely on secondary literature, I had to select conflicts for which sufficient material on forced relocation was available. This limited the range of possible cases, since there are not many studies of relocation and conflict histories documenting these strategies often lack details about them. The three cases in Chapter 6 rely on academic studies, human rights reports, and journalistic accounts of each conflict, providing direct quotations and citing multiple sources from the secondary literature. I use a mechanism-centered approach based on process tracing, which is especially useful for uncovering the logics underlying violence against civilians.Footnote 59 This is appropriate since fine-grained quantitative data from war zones, especially on population displacement, are usually difficult if not impossible to collect.
In Chapter 7, I explore whether the arguments in this book can extend to the third type of strategic displacement – depopulation – and not just forced relocation. To do so, I examine the use of displacement by pro-government forces during the civil war in Syria. Although various observers have argued that uprooting civilians has been a key feature of the Syrian government’s military strategy, they have often characterized these measures as “ethno-sectarian cleansing” or “demographic engineering” and – implicitly or explicitly – attributed them to sectarian motivations. I question this portrayal and show that, while some patterns of civilian flight induced by pro-government forces are consistent with cleansing, strategic displacement has primarily taken the form of depopulation. This context therefore allows me to leverage within-case variation in the use of two different types of displacement by state actors. Moreover, since there are too few cases of depopulation in my cross-national dataset to draw reliable conclusions from the analysis in Chapter 4, Syria offers an opportunity to assess the logics underlying this particular displacement strategy and probe the scope conditions of my theory.
Studying an active civil war presents unique challenges. Except for a short research trip to northeast Syria, it was not feasible for me to travel to most parts of the country and access many key informants and decision-makers, particularly on the government side. Despite these limitations, there are still plenty of reasons to examine this case. One is its political, moral, and humanitarian significance. In addition to being a civil war, Syria has become a proxy conflict for multiple, broader geopolitical rivalries, garnering military involvement from Iran, Iraq, Russia, Turkey, and the US. It has entailed the intentional killing of thousands of civilians and the deployment of chemical weapons with impunity, undermining the normative underpinnings of the current world order and stirring global outrage. Some twelve million Syrians – half of the country’s pre-war population – have been uprooted within or outside the country. This has placed an immense burden on Syria’s refugee-receiving neighbors Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan; strained the international humanitarian system; and contributed to a surge in migration to Europe that has proven politically destabilizing.
Against this backdrop, there is much to gain from examining the dynamics of the Syrian conflict. Moreover, Syria is arguably the first fully “tweeted” civil war, as it has been extensively documented in real time on social media. As a result, there is a wealth of information available online and through various human rights and monitoring groups that have carefully tracked, documented, and analyzed the conflict’s dynamics. I leverage both quantitative and qualitative data from media reports, primary documents published on social media, and human rights records, along with data on violence and displacement collected by NGOs. I also draw on interviews with activists, journalists, combatants, and regime defectors that I conducted over several trips to Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon between 2016 and 2019.
1.4.2 Findings
State combatants have engaged in strategic displacement in 60 percent of civil wars since 1945 (100 of 166 conflicts). Of those, forced relocation has been used in 55 percent of cases, cleansing 35 percent, and depopulation 15 percent. The burning question is whether these strategies have different causes, or whether they operate under a single logic, as some scholars have suggested.Footnote 60
My findings challenge this suggestion and show that different displacement strategies are employed in different types of conflicts and appear to follow different logics. States primarily use forced relocation in asymmetric, or irregular, wars: those where rebels use guerrilla tactics, which causes significant identification problems for government forces. Cleansing, by contrast, is more common in symmetric civil wars: those fought using conventional tactics, where enemy identification is less of a challenge and territorial conquest takes primacy. How rebels fight therefore incentivizes states to use displacement in different ways, which explains why incumbents rarely employ different types within the same conflict.Footnote 61
Governments are also more likely to employ cleansing when rebels represent a particular ethnic group, which offers a basis for identifying disloyal civilians through ethnic profiling. This is consistent with the notion that cleansing follows a logic of collective punishment. In contrast, the evidence indicates that forced relocation follows a sorting logic. First, these strategies tend to be employed against insurgencies in rural, peripheral territories – areas where the population is most illegible to the state. Second, incumbents tend to relocate when they lack group-level information about wartime loyalties. In nonethnic wars, or in ethnic wars where the conflict zone is socially homogenous, counterinsurgents cannot profile along identity lines and are likely instead to resort to spatial profiling through relocation. Third, within irregular wars, forced relocation is more likely when resource-constrained incumbents are engaged in multiple conflicts. These patterns align with the implications of my argument: forced relocation, but not cleansing, is strongly associated with contexts where identification problems are acute and resources are limited for state forces.
Why do governments turn to forced relocation in these environments? In the case studies, I find compelling evidence for my theoretical mechanism and the idea that relocation is used as a sorting mechanism and a force multiplier. As two soldiers in Uganda told me:
It was impossible to differentiate between rebels and civilians. So we came up with this idea of having people move to [IDP] camps, which were very important [because] they helped us know who the enemy was. Then, identifying rebels became very easy. In the camps were the good people, and anyone we discovered outside the camps was considered a rebel or a collaborator. So we could just target them.Footnote 62
We were always trying to mobilize the population, and the camps helped us. People [in the camps] had nothing to do. Nothing to sell. So if we [the army] are looking for people to help us fight, you should volunteer. Help defend your family and your country.Footnote 63
Similarly, in Burundi, Indonesia, and Vietnam, I find that perpetrators used forced relocation to overcome identification problems posed by guerrilla insurgencies. They did this by drawing inferences about the identities and allegiances of the local population based on civilian flight patterns and physical locations. Moreover, political and military authorities used relocation to extract economic and military resources from the displaced – notably recruits – which in some instances helped fill critical resource gaps. I also find evidence that a desire to deny rebels access to civilian support contributed to counterinsurgents’ motivations for relocating civilians. Yet interdiction is not sufficient to explain the use of these measures within or across conflicts. Overall, the evidence from these cases suggests that my theory travels beyond Uganda and is applicable in other diverse contexts.
I do not claim that my theory explains every aspect of strategic displacement in these conflicts or that it is the only factor at play. A comprehensive analysis of all displacement strategies is not the objective of this book. Rather, it seeks to, first, explore the conditions under which different displacement strategies are employed, and second, develop and illuminate the sorting logic of strategies other than cleansing in diverse contexts. It is equally important, however, to note what I do not find in my analysis. None of the three types of strategic displacement – cleansing, depopulation, or forced relocation – seem to depend on whether the government is politically inclusive, the level of threat posed by the insurgency, or the intensity of the conflict. All three strategies have been used in ethnic and nonethnic conflicts, in wars of secession and battles over government control, against strong and weak rebels, and in all world regions. I do not find much evidence that these strategies are a product of ethnic nationalism or desperation. Overall, there is support for the idea that while cleansing is a consequence of profiling along ethnic, religious, or tribal lines, forced relocation is a means of profiling the population along spatial lines.
Finally, there is evidence that my arguments may also apply to at least some cases of depopulation, in addition to forced relocation. In the case of the Syrian civil war, I find that government strategies of cleansing and depopulation were employed in particular places and under certain conditions. Pro-regime forces pursued cleansing early in the conflict in religiously mixed and non-cosectarian enclaves, and when they were acquiring or consolidating control over a given territory. Rather than sectarian animosity, collective targeting often stemmed from the use of sect as a proxy for political loyalty, which is consistent with the findings of my cross-national analysis. Yet most displacement by the Syrian regime has taken the form of indiscriminate depopulation – a method that the regime and its allies increasingly adopted as they faced acute information and resource problems. On the surface, the regime’s depopulation methods seemed to simply follow a logic of denial (or interdiction). Strategic cities and towns held by the opposition were targeted to undermine the ability of Syrian rebels to govern and deprive them of the civilians they relied on for support. A deeper dive into this case, however, uncovered evidence that the regime’s depopulation methods had a sorting element. Authorities made assumptions about people’s political associations based on whether they fled areas targeted for displacement, and whether they moved to regime or rebel-held territory. They treated the displaced as military and political assets, forcibly conscripting dislocated civilians to help reinforce the depleted Syrian army while hailing the arrival of the displaced as evidence of the regime’s legitimacy. Consequently, population displacement has actually increased the social heterogeneity of some areas, particularly government strongholds. My theory helps explain some puzzling elements of the Syrian case and questions the notion that displacement has been intended solely, or even primarily, to achieve demographic change.
These findings have broad implications for the study of forced migration, conflict, and political violence, and for policy efforts to manage and respond to forced population movements. I discuss these implications in Chapter 8. The analysis in this book challenges some core assumptions about how and why combatants engage in displacement and demonstrates that conventional explanations are incomplete. Strategic displacement is often not a simple play for territory, and different kinds of conflict environments encourage armed groups to use displacement for different purposes. To understand this variation, we must consider how combatants interpret moving and staying in war to be a political act. Seen from this perspective, displacement is, at its core, an inherently political phenomenon that can have widespread social consequences during and after conflict. This has profound implications for our understanding of the dynamics and repercussions of forced migrations and can offer lessons for policymakers, practitioners, and advocates. In light of the strain being placed on aid agencies by rising global displacement, growing hostility toward refugees in many countries, and concern over the potentially destabilizing effects of protracted refugee and IDP situations, addressing wartime displacement is both urgent and timely.
