“'Ethnic cleansing': An analysis of conceptual & empirical ambiguity" (forthcoming at Political Science Quarterly)
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" (forthcoming at Security Studies)
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 government 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 one 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.
"Introducing the Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion Dataset," Journal of Peace Research, Vol 59, No. 5 (2022), pp. 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.
“'The People Admire and Trust Hitler': Race, Risk and American Religious Groups’ Views of Nazi Germany in 1935,"withMelissa Wilde (UPenn Sociology) (Revise & Resubmit)
What explains variation in American religious groups’ support for Nazi Germany and Hitler’s authoritarianism before the U.S. entered the Second World War? We employ a novel set of data of more than 1,700 articles from 25 of America’s most prominent religious denominations, and information from the Census of Religious Bodies, to answer this question. Using a comparative-historical approach, we find that two factors were crucial in determining American religious groups’ views of Hitler: whether groups accepted white supremacy and whether they were incumbents or challengers in the American religious field. Our findings underscore the growing theoretical agreement that racial resentment is key to support for authoritarianism, and call attention to religious groups’ complicity in its growth, both active and passive.
"Bridging Exclusionary Politics Approaches,"with Harris Mylonas(George Washington University)
Exclusionary politics have been studied from various vantage points. To an extent this is an outgrowth of different subfields of political science—forced migration, conflict, nation-building—focused on different aspects of exclusionary politics. We define exclusionary politics as deliberate policies targeting civilians by state or non-state actors aiming at eliminating individuals or groups, along certain characteristics that are salient in each society. In this analytical essay, we identify how different subfields engage with this topic from different vantage points, depending on their research question of interest and methodological choices. By documenting these different choices in works studying similar phenomena we highlight how the varied conceptualizations, operationalizations, and scope conditions affect a) which theories can be tested, b) the results we get, and c) the theories we find support for. These differences are not inherently problematic, but they may introduce bias in scholars’ data collection process, findings, and the generalizability of their arguments. Our goal is not to introduce exclusionary politics as an umbrella term for the sake of “meaningless togetherness,” but rather to encourage introspection and dialogue across these fields. We suggest that bridging these approaches could build a fruitful foundation for collaboration, comparative studies, and combined datasets.
“To kill, expel, or coerce? Towards a theory of eliminationist strategies"
Governments of multi-ethnic societies may implement management or eliminationist strategies toward minority groups within their territory. If they decide to eliminate a group they will choose among policies of genocide, mass expulsion, coercive assimilation, or territorial exclusion. But how do they choose to kill, expel, or coerce? Using a within case comparison of the Ottoman Empire/Turkish Republic’s treatment of Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds in the early twentieth century this theory-building study generates new hypotheses about why governing elites implement different policies toward different groups, as well as different policies toward the same group over time. Four macro categories, organized around a series of probing questions, emerge from the case study suggesting important drivers of the variation: salient identity cleavage/type of group threat, geopolitics, topography and border management, and gendarmerie capabilities. The paper argues that eliminationist policies should be understood as substitutes rather than complements that are contingent on the emergent context and constraints on the preferred policy option. This study contributes to our understanding of mass atrocities, elite decision-making, and variation in ethnic violence.
Works in Progress
“'Voluntary' Removal: Government Strategies of Indirect Mass Expulsion"
Governments around the world have consistently expelled ethnic groups en masse. Yet some governments have internalized human rights norms against mass expulsion and refugee refoulement and have instead turned to other means of removing ‘unwanted populations.’ This work-in-progress examines systems of control in which governments create unbearable conditions that induce some of the targeted group to leave “voluntarily.” I argue that the use of “voluntary” removal is a means of indirect mass expulsion that should be analyzed alongside more explicit eliminationist policies. The paper analyzes the use of this strategy of indirect mass expulsion over time in post-WWII Japan toward the Zainichi Koreans, post-colonial Tanzania against Asian minorities, and more recently in Lebanon toward Syrian refugees. While it may not achieve the goal of en masse removal as effectively or expeditiously as mass expulsion, the use of discriminatory legislation and ethnically targeted policies to provoke removal is an insidious tool of demographic engineering.