"The Limits of Language: ‘Gender Apartheid’ and Public Opinion." International Affairs, 102(4): 1393-1413 (with Joshua Schwartz): DOI.
The prominent #EndGenderApartheid campaign was launched in 2023, calling for the global recognition of the crime of gender apartheid. A key component of the campaign's strategy is to mobilize a global mass movement akin to that against racial apartheid in South Africa. The implicit assumption is that the language of gender apartheid evokes a stronger response among the public than alternatives such as the language of gender persecution. We tested the effectiveness of this rhetorical frame in a survey experiment on 1,200 members of the United States public and 100 US elites, finding null effects. However, informing respondents that the systematic oppression of women violates international law significantly increased their support for policy action. Legal codification may thus have a stronger impact on public opinion than subtle rhetorical framing related to the severity and scope of human rights abuses. We also uncovered evidence of a spillover effect between distinct human rights issues, where more pro-Israeli individuals were less responsive to the gender apartheid frame than pro-Palestinian respondents, likely because Israel has been accused of apartheid. Overall, our study contributes to broader academic debates about the impact of language, the efficacy of international law, and the possibility of backlash effects in response to human rights shaming.
“Eliminationist Politics: An Analytical Framework.” 2026. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 52(4): 891-909(with Harris Mylonas): DOI.
The study of eliminationist policies – deliberate actions by state or non-state actors aimed at destroying, removing, or erasing groups based on salient identity categories – has yielded significant theoretical insights across the social sciences. Yet, considerable variation persists in how scholars conceptualise and operationalise various eliminationist policies, shaped by divergent research questions, methodological approaches, and sub-disciplinary commitments. While such variation is not inherently problematic, it carries important implications for theory development, empirical testing, and, crucially, for understanding both the motivations behind eliminationist policies and their prevention. To illustrate the impact of this divergence, we analyse scholarly treatment of the 1923 Greco-Turkish compulsory population exchange – a paradigmatic case of elimination – highlighting how different conceptual and operational choices shape causal inferences, theoretical frameworks, and claims to generalisability. We then introduce the seven articles in this special issue, which examine the causes, rhetoric, tactics, and consequences of various eliminationist policies. By fostering dialogue across subfields, this body of research underscores the value of cross-disciplinary engagement in refining concepts, advancing theory, generating new research questions, and improving our understanding of these abhorrent phenomena. Together, these contributions lay the groundwork for a more integrated analytical framework of eliminationist politics.
"The Various Facets of Eliminationist Politics: Conflict, Nation-Building, and Forced Migration." 2025. International Political Science Review, 46(3): 336-352 (with Harris Mylonas): Link.
Eliminationist policies, as defined in this article, are deliberate actions by state or non-state actors, that aim to destroy, remove, or erase certain groups on the basis of salient social identity characteristics. Conflict, nation-building, and forced migration scholars examine different facets of these policies, and related tactics, motivated by different research questions or methodological choices. This has resulted in academic silos, with varied conceptualizations, operationalizations, and scope conditions. These, in turn, limit theory-building and testing, introduce sources of potential bias, and undermine the generalizability of the findings. To address these shortcomings, we propose a new field of ‘eliminationist politics’ encouraging cross-field dialogue. We believe that bringing these scholars into conversation will enhance theorizing, generate new research questions, and spur data collection efforts.
“'Ethnic Cleansing': An Analysis of Conceptual & Empirical Ambiguity." 2023. Political Science Quarterly, 138(4): 469-489: Link.
Despite significant scholarly disagreement about its definition, core meaning, and corresponding cases, ethnic cleansing has escaped careful conceptual examination. This article identifies five key areas of conceptual confusion that undermine the integrity and utility of the concept. These include discrepancies over its core meaning; tension between ethnic cleansing as a practice versus a policy; the lack of boundedness between ethnic cleansing and other related concepts; the universe of cases that belong together; and disparate sub-type classification criteria. This conceptual confusion undermines effective comparative analysis and in turn our understanding of the causes of ethnic cleansing and associated policy recommendations. The solution is to abandon the social science usage of ethnic cleansing in favor of alternative concepts defined by the distinct intent of the perpetrator(s): massacre (to annihilate), mass expulsion (to remove), coercive assimilation (to eliminate a unique cultural identity), and control (to subjugate). This eliminates ambiguity, improves theoretical precision, and opens a promising new research agenda.
"What Enables or Constrains Mass Expulsion? A New Decision-Making Framework," 2023. Security Studies, 32(3): 537-567: Link.
Given similar probabilities of mass expulsion, why do some governments expel ethnic groups en masse and others refrain? Extending the genocide studies literature on the dynamics of restraint, this theory-building study introduces a new framework to conceptualize the process of governments' mass expulsion policy decisions. The novel paired comparison case study of Asian minorities in post-colonial Uganda and Kenya generates new hypotheses about what enables and constrains a specific type of eliminationist policy. Despite analogous contexts, target populations, and motives to expel, in 1972 Uganda systematically expelled up to 80,000 South Asians en masse, while in 1967-69 Kenya did not. The negative case of Kenya, a country that seemed likely to expel but refrained, highlights important factors that constrain government expulsion decisions: alliances, target group “homeland” state(s), and international organizations. Evidence was drawn from archival research conducted at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Committee of the Red Cross. The article concludes outlining a research agenda to test the new analytical framework to contribute to our understanding of demographic engineering policies and restraints on ethnic violence.
“'The People Admire and Trust Hitler': Race, Risk and American Religious Groups’ Views of Nazi Germany in 1935," 2023. TheBritish Journal of Sociology, 74(4): 598-623 (withMelissa Wilde): Link.
What explains American religious groups’ views of Nazi Germany before the U.S. entered the Second World War? Using a comparative-historical approach, we employ a novel set of data on 25 of America’s most prominent religious denominations to answer this question. We find that two factors were crucial in explaining religious elite discourse about Hitler in the U.S. in 1935: whether leaders believed in white supremacy and whether their denominations were incumbents or challengers in the American religious field. Our findings underscore the growing theoretical consensus that racial resentment is key to support for authoritarianism and call attention to religious groups’ complicity in its growth, both active and passive.
"Introducing the Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion Dataset," 2022. Journal of Peace Research, 59(5): 767-776. Link.
This article introduces the Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion dataset documenting cross-border mass expulsion episodes around the world from 1900-2020. This new dataset focuses on mass expulsion policies in which governments systematically remove ethnic, racial, religious or national groups, en masse. The GSME dataset disaggregates mass expulsion from other exclusionary politics concepts to isolate policies of intentional group-based population removal. This allows for a systematic examination of governmental expulsion policies, distinct from policies aimed at annihilation (genocide), control (massacre), or cultural elimination (coercive assimilation). The GSME dataset documents 139 expulsion episodes since 1900, affecting over 30 million citizens and non-citizens across all world regions. The data is drawn from archival research conducted at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as secondary sources and extant datasets. This article presents an empirical overview of the data including information on the expelling country, onset, duration, region, scale, category of persons expelled and frequency. Although mass expulsion is a rare event, it is a reoccurring rare event. Its consistent use—with over two million people expelled in the last five years alone—demands additional empirical and theoretical investigation. The GSME dataset contributes to the study of exclusionary politics as a dependent variable, but it also offers promise as an explanatory variable for those studying phenomena affected by mass expulsion.
"Apartheid: A Quest for Conceptual Clarity,” (with Oded Haklai), forthcoming in International Affairs
"Breaking the Cycle of Refoulement: Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Rohingya Agency" “The Regime Complex for Climate Migration” (with Sabrina Arias and Christopher Blair)
"To Kill, Expel, or Coerce? Explaining Variation in Government Eliminationist Policies"