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International migration is inextricably connected to a wide range of issues and dilemmas that confront governments and peoples across the globe today. Increasing racism and neo-Nazi violence in Germany, ‘ethnic cleansing’ in former Yugoslavia and police brutality towards blacks in Los Angeles, are all recent examples of problems that are linked to migration in one way or another. Migration, however, is as old as humanity itself, and has played a crucial role in shaping the world throughout history. But while it has been a constant feature of human history, the causes, characteristics, patterns and directions of migration have never remained constant; they have always influenced and been influenced by changing economic, social and political conditions within and between states. The aim of this chapter is to chart the major developments in international migration and to examine their implications.

This paper argues for the role of technology, such as artificial intelligence, which includes machine learning, in managing conflicts between herders and farmers in Nigeria. Conflicts between itinerant Fulani herders and farmers over the years have resulted in the destruction of lives, properties, and the displacement of many indigenous communities across Nigeria, with devastating social, economic and political consequences. Over time, the conflicts have morphed into ethnic stereotypes, allegations of ethnic cleansing, forceful appropriation and divisive entrenchment of labels that are inimical to national existence. The reality of climate change and increased urbanization suggest that conflicts are likely to exacerbate over shrinking resources in the near future. Finding solutions to the conflicts, therefore requires innovative thinking capable of addressing the limits of past approaches. While mindful of the human and political dimension of the conflicts, I argue using the method of philosophical analysis that technology possesses the capacity for social transformation, and make a case for the modernization of grazing culture and the curbing of crossborder grazing through machine learning (ML) and other forms of artificial intelligence. Machine Learning represents a transformative technology that addresses the security challenges of irregular migration, accommodates the nomadic and subsistent mode of farming associated with the conflicting parties while enabling a gradual but stable transition to full modernization. I conclude that machine learning holds many prospects for minimizing conflicts and attaining social cohesion between herders and farmers when properly complemented by other mechanisms of social cohesion that may be political in nature.

This paper juxtaposes and examines in a fresh light the genealogy of concepts (especially the labels Nakba and War of Independence, used by Palestinians and Israelis, respectively), to conceptualize and represent the ethnic cleansing of Palestine—a process that gathered momentum in 1948, and lead to both the displacement of the Palestinian people and the transformation of Mandate Palestine into present-day Israel. The article seeks to answer the question of whether these conceptualizations or labels are accurate in what they represent, and attendant repercussions. Utilizing a discourse-conceptual analysis framework, the article demonstrates how both of these lexical representations have mystified and perpetuated settler-colonialism. The article argues for a necessary counter-discourse that would rename and restructure the world’s understanding of key events in the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The article concludes that the first step towards social change and decolonization entails a conceptual and discursive change in nationalist discourse: the key carrier of conceptual dynamics and change of social reality and history.Keywords: The Palestine question, 1948, Nakba, CDA, critical discourse studies (CDS), discourse-conceptual analysis (DCA), sister concepts, ethnic cleansing, lexical representation

Of all the changes that can be documented since the founding of Israel, none is as dramatic and surprising as the country’s status as a topic of intellectual inquiry. Once a trope for self-sacrifice and solidarity, a testament to the redemption of a bruised and battered people, the Jewish state, today, stands accused of practicing apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and of sustaining itself as a remnant of an outdated and thoroughly delegitimized colonial order. The Summer 2019 special issue of Israel Studies, “Word Crimes: Reclaiming the Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,”1 explores this lexical transformation and describes how and why it acquired its totemic standing in the academy. More than a sloganized language of politics, the terms interrogated comprise a poisonous distillation of history and politics that has hardened the conventional views of not only scholars who exercise increasing control over the corridors of academic power, but also of journalists and elected officials. As Cary Nelson put it, first these terms form opinions, then convictions, and finally they shape personal identity....

This article examines the social and political effects produced by the most recent wave of emigration in postwar Bosnia, widely understood to be the result of continued political instability and economic decline that followed the 1992–95 war. Drawing on ethnographic research in a deindustrialized Bosnian town and analysis of popular discourses seeking to make sense of this new wave of departures, I show how the phenomenon of postwar exit impacts those staying behind and inspires new forms of reflection that link past histories of violence to more recent forms of dispossession. The emergence of such forms of historical consciousness reveals that postwar migration is haunted both by the memory of wartime expulsions and ethnic cleansing, as well as by the often-unacknowledged violence of postwar economic restructuring glossed as the postsocialist transition. In asking what happens to nationalist regimes, as well as scholarship on nationalist politics, when the “people” leave, I demonstrate the need to analyze the ongoing out-migration both in terms of Bosnia’s historical specificity and global political-economic dynamics. In so doing, I show how absences created by these departures create new vantage points that bring to light and expose unsettling political configurations left behind by the Bosnian war.

The systematic persecution and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas by Myanmar which resulted from populist hatred can be traced back to the Second World War when the Rohingyas sided with the British. Xenophobia has taken a permanent shape in the practice of power, the motive force behind the actions and reactions of successive Myanmar states and political elites. The colonial legacy has been used as the rationale for isolation and the use of violence against the Rohingyas. The socio-historical constructed and imposed identity throughout the colonial and post-colonial years has been used by the majority Buddhists to dehumanize the Rohingyas. The article argues that the historical identity creation and imposition by the majority Buddhists have facilitated the recent refugee crisis. The article aims to identify whether the tactics of post-truth politics have been used to fuel populist anti-Rohingya feelings among the majority Buddhists.

Throughout history, attacks on women have been common during armed conflict. Frequently military forces have viewed sexual violence as a spoil of war, a punishment to defeated populations, or as the deviance of rogue soldiers. However, conflicts in which sexual violence has been weaponized have been increasing. When a military force's command utilizes systematic and widespread sexual violence as a weapon of war against a specific group, in both intent and effect, it fulfills every condition of the Geneva Convention standards of genocide. In this article, we analyze three cases: Bosnia during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda during its genocide, and Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship. Motivations for each of the conflicts varied, from ethnic cleansing to the elimination of a competing political group, however, the constant in all three was the intended elimination of a specific group and a state sanctioned implementation of a policy of sexual violence in order to do so. Egregious acts of sexual violence were deliberately planned to murder, to incur permanent mental and physical harm, to demoralize and destroy the group's ability to procreate in the future, and to impose measures upon the group to bring about its end. Based on these examples, we argue that, irrespective of the cause of a conflict, systematic and widespread sexual violence used as a weapon of war must be classified as genocide. Our intention is not to expand the definition of genocide, but rather to more clearly specify the definition in light of advancements in the understanding of the impacts of sexual violence on societies.

During the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the built physical landscape and places of cultural heritage were deliberately targeted and destroyed as part of the strategy of ethnic cleansing. The 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement recognized the potential for cultural heritage to contribute to postwar reconciliation and rebuilding; Annex 8 established a commission to preserve national monuments. This paper examines the politics of cultural heritage in post-Dayton Bosnia and the ways in which it has been (ab)used to propagate a narrow, exclusivist identity. It focuses on the struggles to control the Commission to Preserve National Monuments as well as the fates of two monuments in particular—Vraca Memorial Park and the Partisans’ Memorial Cemetery—whose abandonment signifies the wider struggles over memory and identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The current migration and refugee crisis in Europe requires an understanding of the different migration drivers beyond the well-known economic determinants. In this article, we view migration from a broader human security perspective and analyze the determinants of regular and asylum seeker migration flows from Africa to Europe for the period 1990 to 2014. Our results show that, in addition to economic determinants, a combination of push and pull factors influences migration decisions of individuals. In particular, rising political persecution, human rights violations, ethnic tensions, political instability, and civil conflicts in African source countries are all significantly associated with increased migration flows into European destination countries. Therefore, our results underscore the need for the European Union and European countries to collaborate with the source countries, not only in terms of supporting economic development in the source countries but also in promoting human security: human rights, democracy, peace, and social stability.

The status of ethnic cleansing as a punishable act in the international criminal law is being a subject of quarrel. Those who reject its criminal status argue based on the principle of legality while the other group contends, lacking the existence of explicit law, still there is a room to prosecute ethnic cleansing through major international crimes like crime of genocide or crime against humanity. Although, ethnic cleansing is a crucial political and legal discourse in the current Ethiopia, it is not mentioned as a punishable act in its laws. Discovering the criminal status of ethnic cleansing under the criminal law of Ethiopia is the purpose of this paper. Basing on the accompanying crimes particularly the gravity of the offense producing ethnic cleansing and the contextual element required, this paper concludes categorizing ethnic cleansing in the crime of genocide and crime against humanity.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is an example of “responsibility” becoming an institutionalized part of normative order, not only in practice but also in name. This chapter asks how the introduction of responsibility contributed to negotiating the protection of populations from war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and ethnic cleansing and what we can learn about responsibility in world politics through the case of R2P. The chapter starts with the protection dilemmas that arose by the end of the 1990s and shows that introducing responsibility to the debate responded to these normative conundrums on four levels: of discourse, institutionalization, collective expectations, and public justifications for state action. It argues that, on all four levels, responsibility facilitated the negotiation of protection, i.e. led to a better specification of what protection is and who should carry it out. It did so by providing politically acceptable terms of debate on the level of discourse and facilitating institutionalized knowledge on mass atrocities in policy-making. On the levels of collective expectations and public justifications for action, it ignited debates on specific responsibilities and understandings of protection, thus clarifying expectations on how to protect.

The Rohingya are a Muslim community living in the current-day province of Rakhine in western Myanmar. The last 10 years have seen waves of violence aimed at driving them from their communities all carried out by an alliance of the military, extremist Buddhist monks, and the ethnic Rakhine political establishment. The violence has never been challenged by the National League for Democracy (NLD) and its leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Key to this consensus is the view that the Rohingyas are foreigners, with no right to live in Myanmar. In 2016, this ethnic cleansing provoked the emergence of an armed resistance among some Rohingya (ARSA). In turn the Myanmar military carried out a sustained campaign of brutality and ethnic cleansing, driving around one million Rohingya into Bangladesh. Most of the Rohingya still in Myanmar are held in camps. Effectively 10 years of national democracy has seen the complete destruction of an ethnic community.

Forced migration traumatizes millions displaced from their homes, but little is known about the few who manage to stay and become a minority in a new society. We study the case of German stayers in Sudetenland, a region from which Czechoslovakia expelled ethnic Germans after World War Two. The unexpected presence of the US Army in parts of 1945 Czechoslovakia resulted in more anti-fascist Germans avoiding displacement compared to regions liberated by the Red Army. We study the long-run impacts of this local variation in the presence of left-leaning stayers and find that Communist party support and local party cell frequencies, as well as far-left values and social policies are more pronounced today where anti-fascist Germans stayed in larger numbers. Our findings also suggest that political identity supplanted German ethnic identity among anti-fascist stayers. The German staying minority shaped the political identity of newly formed local societies after ethnic cleansing by providing the ‘small seed’ of political development.

Scholars acknowledge that Indigenous Latinx immigrants’ complex process of adapting to life in the United States, or incorporation, differs from that of their non-Indigenous counterparts. Understanding these differences is especially important as arrivals of Indigenous refugees and asylum seekers from Central America have increased steadily over the past decade and intensified in the last few years. Among them are undocumented, unaccompanied youth, whose migration to the U.S. reached a historic high in 2014 and has persisted into the present (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2020). Guatemalans make up the largest segment of the unaccompanied minor migrant population arriving from Central America today. In 2019, Guatemalans made up about 41% of unaccompanied minors apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2020). Many come from rural, often predominantly Maya regions such as the Western Highlands (Stinchcomb & Hershberg, 2014). Their migration is due largely to a legacy of political and gang-related violence and economic instability in the aftermath of a civil war in which Indigenous Guatemalans were targets of ethnic cleansing.

In our analyses we focus on the fact that in 2012 Slovenia was judged as systematically violating the right to respect for private life by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), due to its “erasure” in 1992 of residence permits for more than 25,000 persons from other former Yugoslav countries. The consequence of the erasure amounted to a stripping from the erased of the right to have rights. In fact, it was a form of administrative ethnic cleansing. Slovenia did not officially recognize the existence of a violation until 1999, when its Constitutional Court passed a judgment on the issue. Yet the erasure and its appalling consequences continued. Slovenian state authorities made numerous attempts to remedy the situation, but these efforts were always, at least in part, subverted by the rightist political forces.

In recent years, due to some contemporary political influences in Russia, Circassian activists, and some foreign states have proposed that the Circassian exile (forced deportations) and Russian colonization in the 19th century, might be considered as an expression of the contemporary notion in philosophical politics of ethnic cleansing and the genocide by the Russian Empire. This campaign claims that according to the historical records during these colonization thousands upon thousands of humans were massacred. Hence, the formation of the Circassian Genocide as an international issue is begun to be internationalized, this paper tries to clarify the legitimacy question of the Circassian Genocide based on the ethical dimension and the meaning of genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. We describe this view about moral epistemology elsewhere, but we will not elaborate on it in the present context. Another important factor that we will survey in this study, is the recent activities of Circassians to recognize this historical event as a genocide. Nowadays we see a considerable sort of unification and symphonic movement has been developed in Circassian identity around the international recognition of the genocide. Due to a lot of historical information, the aim of this paper is not to demonstrate or to prove the ethnic cleansing and genocide, but is to discuss that it was a genocide or not, according to our knowledge in Eurasian contemporary politics.

This paper analyzes the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia in Western Ukraine during World War II. The mass murder of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists during the Nazi occupation of Volhynia in 1943 became an important political issue in Poland and Ukraine. Previous studies by Polish, Ukrainian, and Western researchers and Ukrainian and Polish governments policies offered different and often divergent theories and narratives of this case of political violence. A research question is whether this was a Ukrainian-Polish war, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This study analyzes a variety of archival documents, historical studies, and eyewitness accounts. It concludes that the mass murder of the Polish minority in Volhynia by the OUN-B, the UPA, and their security service (SB) represented not a Ukrainian-Polish war or genocide of Poles but that it was a part of ethnic cleansing.

Cold War Europe’s largest and most intensive act of ethnic cleansing, namely, the 1989 expulsion of Turks from communist Bulgaria, remains a neglected subject three decades on after the event. When it took place, the term “ethnic cleansing” had not been invented yet, so in light of international law this expulsion was a “population transfer.” Population transfers (even unilateral) were deemed legal until the mid-1990s. Subsequently, under the influence of the atrocities committed during the wars of Yugoslav succession, population transfers were criminalized and relabelled as “ethnic cleansings.” For a variety of reasons, the 1989 Ethnic Cleansing has been also neglected by scholars and politicians in both, Bulgaria and Turkey. The neglect continues to this day, despite the Bulgarian Parliament’s momentous 2012 Declaration, which officially recognized the expulsion as an act of ethnic cleansing. This Declaration – which could become a basis for successful Turkish-Bulgarian reconciliation – largely remains unknown in both countries, while the propagandistic terminology employed for referring to the 1989 Ethnic Cleansing deepens the oblivion and obfuscates the nature of this tragic event. Both, in Turkish and Bulgarian, official and scholarly terminology employed suggests – incorrectly – that it was a “kind of emigration.” Postprint

Although Muslim residents of Myanmar’s Rakhine (Arakan) State, the Rohingyas, became a focus of international attention following the central government’s alleged “ethnic cleansing” of this group, 700,000 of whom fled into neighbouring Bangladesh in 2017, the Buddhist Rakhines, who form a majority of Rakhine State’s population, are much less well known. Yet they are a key to understanding the region’s contorted and conflict-filled politics. A study of their history in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial times shows how the Rakhine Buddhists have clung to old identities, resisting assimilation with the Burman (Bamar) national ethnic majority as well as refusing to coexist with the alleged muslim “threat” from South Asia.

Since the 1980s, reports of mass psychogenic illness have increasingly featured themes centering around state-sponsored terrorism. In each instance, longstanding political tensions led to the creation of a folk theory that a hostile foreign power was targeting minorities with poisonous substances as a form of ethnic cleansing. The symptoms of ‘Havana Syndrome’ closely parallel illness clusters that have been identified as mass psychogenic illness, after initially being diagnosed as an attack with chemical weapons by a hostile government. Despite initial confusion surrounding these diagnoses, a consensus has emerged within the medical community that they were psychogenic in origin. The involvement of specific ethnic groups is conspicuous as chemical agents cannot discriminate along ethnic lines. This social patterning of symptoms parallels the events in Cuba as only diplomatic staff and their families were affected.

This chapter analyzes the role of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim discourse in North American and European ‘illiberal’ parties, movements, and ideologies. Its first aim is to situate those deployments in a longer history. Occidental engagements with Islam and Muslims, including anti-Islamic tropes, long predate the emergence of liberalism, let along illiberalism. It should not be a surprise that liberalism as it emerged in the nineteenth century partook of such ideas. Contra some theorists, however, I argue that there is no strong evidence that anti-Islam was constitutive of liberal theory or early practice. Rather, it was in the second half of the twentieth century, as mass migration from Africa and Asia to Europe and North America came to be viewed through a fraught geopolitical lens, that various conflicts emerged over ‘assimilation’ and ‘integration.’ These precipitated today’s perceived (if not actual) juxtapositions between Islam and liberalism. It is out of these disjunctions that the current anti-Islamic discourse of illiberal political formations emerges. Such illiberal deployment of Islam hence reflect an extension and modification of liberal political discourse. Ironically, at the extreme, they are transformed into justifications of mass murder and violent ethnic cleansing. The history of anti-Islamic conceptions in illiberalism hence illuminates the unintended and paradoxical trajectory of political ideas.

On 31 July 2018, eighteen representatives of religious minority groups in Turkey, including the Armenians, Greeks, and Syriacs, issued a joint declaration saying: “As religious representatives and directors of different faiths and beliefs who have been residing in our country for centuries, we live out our faiths freely and practice our worship freely according to our traditions.” This state-orchestrated declaration contradicts a long history of discrimination suffered by minorities under different late Ottoman and Turkish political regimes. In the last two decades of the Ottoman Empire's rule, Ottoman Armenian, Greek, and Syriac subjects/citizens, among others, suffered extreme depredations and persecutions culminating in ethnic cleansing, genocide, and population exchange. The books under review deal with a grim phase in Ottoman and Turkish history: the Armenian Genocide during World War I and its repercussions during the subsequent republican period.

The vision for this issue was to create an intellectual space where scholars using diverse methodologies and theoretical frameworks would be afforded the opportunity to showcase their scholarship o...

This article focuses on the novels and short stories written about the ethnic cleansing of Dersim in the Turkish Republic in 1937–1938. Dersim 1937–1938 has become increasingly popular both as a political debate as well as a storyline in cultural productions over the last decade. The historical episode, once kept a secret, is almost an “industry” (“Memory: Concepts and Theory,” 2014) and an example of “memory boom” [Winter, Jay. (2002). Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press]. The aim of this article is to analyze the politics of memory and identity through literary works. It examines novels and short stories that focus on Dersim 1937–1938, or consider the ethnic cleansing in Dersim in a specific part of their storyline. By examining competing descriptions of Dersim memory and identity in these works, my purpose is to understand the mechanisms of literary competition, as well as Dersim’s fragmented collective memory and iden...

This Viewpoint article argues that Sustainable Development Goal 6, which aims to ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all, cannot be achieved for the Palestinian people under the current political situation of Israeli occupation. Through the practice of hydro-hegemony, Israel controls all water resources in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, thus denying water sovereignty to the Palestinians. This is demonstrated through three case studies: The Jordan Valley; the West Bank settlements; and Gaza. The politics of water in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory is best understood as part of the dynamics of settler colonialism, in which ethnic cleansing is achieved through the dispossession of essential resources. The authors discuss what role the international scientific community can play in supporting Palestinian water sovereignty and therefore SDG 6.

What happens when an armed group has military incentives to engage in ethnic cleansing, but political incentives to abstain? I argue that militants can solve this dilemma by collecting intelligence that allows them to discriminate between neutral and militant non-coethnics and target only the latter. Armed groups are better able to do so in intermixed areas, where loyal coethnics provide intelligence, and thus more likely to perpetrate selective violence in such locations. Homogenous, non-coethnic enclaves are more susceptible to ethnic cleansing as armed groups often have little choice but to use ethnicity as proxy for political loyalties. I elaborate and test this argument using an original data set and extensive interviews on a critical case in the literature on ethnic cleansing: the Lebanese civil war of 1975 to 1990.

The issue of democracy in the countries of post-Soviet space is of particular interest to the scientific and expert community. Not the last role in these processes was played by the escalation of the number of ethnic conflicts that have taken place in the territories of these countries. However, the American political scientist M. Mann has offered a new perspective on processes of democratization. He developed the concept of “the dark side of democracy”. According to the author, democracy can be seen not only in the traditional sense as “people power”, but as “the power of a particular ethnic group”. In the second approach, widespread ethnic cleansing that occur in the course of the development of conflicts at the national (religious) grounds. Аll the negative feelings, from class to religious hatred is a reason for the intensification of ethnic nationalism. In the case of escalation of conflict, he began to absorb particular components of ethnic confrontation (favoritism in respect of individual group members, discrimination against outsiders the existence of ethnic tensions, the presence of horizontal inequalities between culturally divided groups). While maintaining these trends, says M. Mann, we can say that the dark side of democracy is expressed in the perversion of the liberal or socialist ideals of democracy. According to M. Mann, at a time when certain ethnic or religious group (Turks, Hutus, Albanians) begin classify themselves as the true exponents of the popular will, is a perversion of the true democratic values and democracy as a whole. Referring to the experience of the Soviet Union, M. Mann notes that the role of such a “privileged” political actor in socialist societies the assigned classes. The analyst notes that a particularly brutal and bloody purge — a phenomenon of modernity, since in earlier times they were not as widespread as in the 80-90-years of the twentieth the twentieth century. As the most striking instance of the countries in which the concept of the dark side of democracy became widespread, the author of the article was chosen Yugoslavia (period 80’s-90’s of the twentieth century) and Ukraine (modern political processes in the country occurring since 2014 to present). These states were chosen because of the similarity of the processes of democratization, the presence of ethnic conflict (the confrontation between Albanians, Croats, Serbs in Jugoslavia and the Western and South-Eastern part of Ukraine), as well as the presence in both countries political actors seeking to justify pre-emptive right to the sovereignty of a particular territory.

The crisis of the Ottoman Empire ended with the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. However, a long process of transformation of political, economical and social imperial structures drove to the foundation of the Turkish State as a European Secular State. The process of Europeanisation of the Ottoman Empire passed across the Tanzimat period - reforms made by the Ottomans during the XIX century - and the rise on power by the Young Turks - the nationalist movement from where Musfata Kemal Ataturk came out. The Kemalist reforms, almost all inspired by the European models of State, accomplished the nationalisation of the religious structures, the Turkish ethnic cleansing and the alliance between Turkey and the West.

In 2010, in an attempt to explore how technology promotes peace, Facebook launched a new feature ‘Peace on Facebook’: “Facebook is proud to play a part in promoting peace by building technology that helps people better understand each other. By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world conflict in the short and long term.” Facebook keeps track of for instance how many “friendships” the company has helped create between people representing arch enemies such as Israel/Palestine, Pakistan/India and Ukraine/Russia under the headline “A World of Friends”. All of them great stories. But Facebook speaks less loudly when it comes to the role of the company in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. In 2014, Facebook moved into the country and within three years, the amount of users went from two to thirty million, and since then Buddhist extremists have used the platform to spread misinformation, encouraging violent upheaval. In 2017, propaganda, threats and coordination via Facebook became a contributing factor in this extensive ethnic cleansing. The fact that the conflict seems to have started with an Islamist massacre of Hindu villages in Rakhine state in August 2017, does not exempt Facebook for parts of the blame for the following escalating violence. In August 2018, after the UN had pointed to Myanmar military leaders as responsible for genocide, Facebook finally chose to remove 20 accounts of individuals and organizations from Myanmar’s top political management, among them General Min Aung Hlaing and the military television network Myawady—their Facebook pages were followed by as many as 12 million out of a total population of 53 million and had been used to encourage genocide. It was the first time Facebook banned political leaders from using the platform. The UN report criticized the role of Facebook as a useful instrument of the armed forces who incited the population to fight the Rohingya people. Facebook admitted that they had reacted too slowly.

In the United States of America, the harsh impact of economic recession has fuelled the politics of hate. Interest rates plunged, bank failures soared, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was dangerously under-funded. Balkan politics, which so preoccupied statesmen and politicians before the Second World War, are being fought out again. Two-way ethnic cleansing in Kosovo has caused external powers to take part. The management of the institutional event found that the some groups had formed themselves consciously as sociometric chains. The management, at one stage, had the working hypothesis that the model of learning being acted out was one of cohesion through adhesion, with like attracting like. The resistance to testing out boundaries and the limits of authority in a baM culture takes the form of withdrawal and passive aggression. Speaking one’s thoughts takes place outside the stated events during breaks for coffee and meals.

In this chapter the author notes the ways that recent events have helped raise consciousness about al-Nakba, the “catastrophe,” that began in 1948 with the ouster of more than 700,000 Arab Palestinians during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. This chapter shows that further debates are needed about al-Nakba politics because for many years few outside of ranks of the “new” Israeli historiographers were willing to contemplate the possibility that some type of ethnic cleansing had taken place during the 1948 expulsions. Using the work of writers such as Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris as touchstones, the author puts on display the varied academic, legal, political, and military reasons why so few want to include the Nakba in the traditional canons of genocidal studies.

This chapter explores the inclusion of Palestine within Transnational American Studies and discusses how intersectional and transnational understandings of the Palestinian intifada can be applied for the analysis of subaltern forms of expression. While the impossibility to effectively differentiate between US and Israeli hegemony has transformed Palestinians into a contemporarily transnationally colonized people, discussions on settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing, while formerly absent from American Studies, were articulated by Black activists and artists, who voiced a transnationalization of the Palestinian intifada as a revolutionary intervention into hegemonic concepts. In order grasp the potential of artist-activist work, and in order to expand the decolonial discourse, Transnational American Studies needs to combine the analysis of political, economic, and military components of transnational hegemony with the highlighting of counter-hegemonic articulations of resistance.

The struggle to break away from the parent state and claim independence often results in political unrest, terrorist activities and even ethnic cleansing. Understanding the nature of the secessionist movement not only does preserve national unity, but can also avoid conflict and violence and maintain peace. Irredentist and secessionist advocators generally defend themselves in terms of common blood, race or culture. None of them regards the issue from the human agency theory, namely Weber-Thomas-Berger’s social construction theory. This chapter uses phenomenological analysis to explain the origin of national identity and hence the emergence of a nation. It argues that social construction of national reality originates from everyday life experience taken for granted during socialization. Individuals make sense of the external world. Experiences taken for granted become the actor’s stock of knowledge. A common scheme of knowledge shared by the community serves to differentiate in-group (nationals) and out-group (foreigners). Collective consciousness thus defines national identity and hence a nation. Unless people (both in-group and out-group) interact with and learn from each other, different stocks of knowledge taken for granted will create political conflict. This theory is applied to the Taiwan Strait conflict. People in Taiwan are searching for national identity, manifested in the processes of Sinicization and Taiwanization. The struggle between Chinese consciousness and Taiwanese consciousness is the underlying cause of conflict within Taiwan and across the Taiwan Strait. The growing tendency of Taiwanization and diminution of Sinicization in Taiwan render the Cross-Strait relation vulnerable. This chapter concludes that Cross-Strait exchanges and communication provide opportunities for people to understand each other and re-define their national identity, hence resulting in a peaceful political resolution between Taiwan and mainland China.

International audience; To explain war rapes in former Yugoslavia, the work of cultural ideology is never complete, but an unstable relation between cultural activism and cultural norms and practices provides the point of departure to move beyond the stereotyped accounts of mass rapes and develop a neo-structural model of canonical formalization based on discourse analysis and transformational morphodynamics. Methodologically, the new model takes lead from the abstract mathematical operations and canonical transformations suggested by Lévi-Strauss for the structural study of myth. The assumption is that mass rapes are fueled by a specific cultural activism that activates a cultural ideology that makes mass rapes effective in a military strategy of ethnic cleansing.

International audience

Repeated violent attacks and arson campaigns perpetrated by organized gangs targeted Muslim communities in Rakhine State of Myanmar in 2012 and 2013. The attacks came after decades of tension between the Muslim minority and the Rakhine Buddhist majority. Many Muslims--mainly those often known as Rohingya--in Rakhine State are effectively stateless, having failed to attain any form of citizenship. (1) Campaigns against Muslims in Rakhine State, who make up around one third of the State's overall population of about 3.2 million, (2) have been described by Human Rights Watch as "ethnic cleansing". (3) In 2012, groups of local Rakhine activists razed communities to the ground in central districts of the State as part of a concerted effort to change the area's ethnic composition. Further violent clashes have been attributed to perpetrators from both the minority and majority communities, but reputable sources agree that the main aggressors were affiliated with Rakhine Buddhist networks. (4) Casualty figures are unreliable, but up to 1,000 people, the majority of them Muslim, are thought to have died in inter-communal violence during 2012. In two waves of attacks, most of the Muslims living in central parts of Rakhine State were displaced from their communities and relocated to isolated camps. Their freedom of movement remained restricted after the violence subsided. (5) In most instances, a similar pattern of violence evolved. A specific and emotive flashpoint, such as allegations of offences committed by Muslim men against Rakhine women, was seized as a rallying call for a violent response by groups of mostly young Rakhine men. Tensions remained high and in 2015 most of the 140,000 Muslims who had fled from their homes were still confined to camps. (6) Individuals associated with the 2012 violence appear to have close ties to ethnic Rakhine politicians such as Kyaw Zaw Oo, a political activist who published an outspoken revisionist tract alleging that Muslims in Rakhine State were aliens. Despite having been arrested for his role in the communal violence of 2012, he stood successfully for a parliamentary seat in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State in the November 2015 general elections. (7) This article explores the reasons behind the outbreak of violence in Rakhine State in 2012. It considers patterns identified in comparative analyses of communal and ethnic violence, and identifies the main factors that affect this specific case. The research approach uses primary data, consisting mainly of interviews by the author with key informants in Rakhine State and Yangon during several periods in 2013 and 2014. Secondary sources were also consulted, including media coverage, official government statements, reports from humanitarian agencies, online blogs and published academic work. (8) Taken together, these sources cover the circumstances and the wider context of the violence in Rakhine State at that time. The findings also take account of the outcome of the elections of 8 November 2015, an important landmark for politicians in Rakhine State and for all of Myanmar. In addressing the reasons behind ethnic conflicts, researchers have considered specific aspects of violence, focusing on identifiable political and social factors that can be observed across recent conflicts. Empirical studies suggest that the risk of violence is greater among populations with high levels of stratification along ethnic lines whereby certain ethnic groups are more privileged than others. Frances Stewart's work builds on earlier literature addressing multiethnic societies and finds that disparities between ethnic groups or "horizontal inequalities" increase the likelihood of conflict. (9) Michael Mann states that in areas inhabited by different ethnic groups, a high level of nationalism defined along ethnic lines tends to justify extreme standpoints, enable leaders to create scapegoats out of minorities and reduce the scope to manage inter-group tensions. …

Guy Lancaster Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883-1924: Politics, Land, Labor, and Criminality, New York: Lexington Books, 2014; 186 pp.: ISBN 0739195492, 24.95 [pounds sterling] Lancaster provides a historical and sociological account of racial cleansing in the state of Arkansas from the post-Reconstruction era until the post-World War I period. Its historical account examines the racial politics and violence of the period and employs the concept of racial cleansing, the use of which provides the sociological basis of the work. The term 'sundown town' refers to a town or community that employed tactics to remove African Americans, often by force, from the area or to keep them from inhabiting that area. These settlements were often found in the American South, but away from the agricultural regions where the labour of Blacks was needed to sustain the local economies. Lancaster feels the term 'sundown town', while capturing its historical significance, is inadequate in that it fails to explain the rationale behind the motivations that created these spaces; therefore, the term 'racial cleansing', a derivative of the more widely used term ethnic cleansing, is used. Although similar in many respects to lynching, lynching was normally used to punish a target offender and functioned as a visible reminder to others in the community of the horrendous consequences of challenging the White power structure. Other vigilante actions such as nightriding and whitecapping were attempts to terrorise, but not necessarily extirpate, whole communities. Therefore, though normally not as violent as lynching or vigilantism, racial cleansing had the effect of changing the demography of a region, with its long-term social, cultural, political and economic effects. The Democratic Party gained state political control of Arkansas politics due to a series of manoeuvres that ended up protecting the interests of the moneyed landowners. At the same time, German immigrants began entering the state, escaping both religious persecution and a tenuous economy, to work on Arkansas' newly completed railway system in the 1870s. Blacks outside the region also entered the state, often enticed by bogus claims of hospitality and abundant job opportunities in a fertile agricultural region. The political administration of counties with growing Black populations was initially maintained through a series of'fusion agreements', in which Blacks and Whites shared in local governance. These arrangements soon deteriorated due to White fears of Black domination, fears which were often fuelled by a few instances of racial conflict. Certain politicians took advantage of this conflict to cement racial segregation and maintain White hegemony. Not only were Blacks driven away or repulsed from the railroad industry, terroristic threats and attacks were made against African American workers in other occupations in the developing timber and mining industries and in the well-established field of agriculture. Many poor White farmers, fearing Blacks would take over their jobs, became involved in whitecapping and nightriding activities; however, some large landowners thwarted these terroristic activities through legal action. As the vigilantes were arrested, the cases proceeded through the legislative system, eventually making their way to the US Supreme Court. The highest court in the land ruled that decisions on these racial cleansing activities would be left to the states, basically clearing the way for various forms of racial oppression to continue in the state of Arkansas. …

In Bosnia, three factors led to war: the breakup of former Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic’s political ambitions and military capability, and ethnic nationalism, particularly in its territorial form. It is hard to picture the Bosnian War without any one of these. It is hard to picture peace prevailing with all three. After an initial period of stalemate, the postwar process in Bosnia benefited for almost ten years from ample international commitment of political will and other resources, blocking of Croatia’s support for Croat separatism inside Bosnia, and co-optation of Bosnian elites. The state- and peace-building process stalled thereafter, as the Americans passed the baton to a Europe that fumbled it. Bosnia is still not yet safe from nationalist and Russian destabilization.

The EU has discovered the necessity of having a foreign policy of its own in the aftermath of the Balkan wars in the 1990s. Territorial conflicts and ethnic cleansing, weak and unfinished States urgently required answers, raising, at the same time, difficult questions of political and economic stability and of constitutional values. After the Eastern Enlargement of 2004, the EU’s enlargement policy has been considered as a successful tool capable of adding transformative power to the EU Foreign Policy through the enlargement perspective and the conditionality of reforms. However, although its instruments have been adapted in order to meet the specific challenges of the Western Balkans, stabilization and sustainable transformation of the States in the area still have to be reached. There are even signs of pre-accession fatigue, on both sides: the status quo seems to be the preferred solution of elites in the Balkans while the EU seems to have lost its interest in the area and, consequently, its transformative power. This contribution will explore the reasons and examine recent initiatives, such as the Berlin process, asking what may be done in order to regain momentum.

In 1949, federal parliamentarians were indignant when asked to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (hereafter, UNGC). We could not in any way be associated with ‘the unthinkable’ crime, senior members claimed, because we are ‘a moral people’ with a ‘clean record'. This essay assesses the ‘decent’ Australian democrats who, as the indelible records show, set out to kill the Aboriginal people they deemed ‘vermin’ and then later, decided to engage in a eugenicist fantasy to rid Australia of Aborigines by intermarriage or, failing that, forcibly removing their children in large numbers. The colonial frontier killings were justified as ‘dispersing kangaroos'. Child removals were done ‘in their best interests'. This essay attempts to gain an insight into the mindset of those who did commit ‘the unthinkable’ crime of genocide: killing, removal of children, and ‘causing serious bodily and mental harm'. Subsequent policies infantalised the Aboriginal and Islander population and denied them basic human rights.

This chapter explores the official statistic as a social construction, arguing that the form of the statistic is more important than its content. This is illustrated with the example of the UK’s ‘Measuring National Well-being’ programme. It is first noted that the incoherence of the programme’s measures precludes action: there is no ‘well-being’ which the programme’s measures amount to. It is then noted that the novel aspects of the programme around subjective well-being are economic in form, restricting them to uses in line with existing orthodoxies. The gap between form and content is further illustrated by the use of well-being in Bhutan during a period of ethnic cleansing.

This article addresses the problem of the present-day historical discourse in Poland by taking under scrutiny one specific event: the historical re-enactment of the ethnic cleansing of Polish villagers by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, staged in a small town in southeastern Poland, Radymno, in the summer of 2013. It is based on research, carried out by the author and a group of students in Radymno and its surroundings in the period preceding and following the performance, as well as on content analysis of the press. The comparison of the top-down political and mass media discourse with local responses to the idea of re-enactment and, more broadly, local understandings of Polish–Ukrainian relations, reveal many contradictions. In attempting to understand them, the article discusses broader ramifications of the ‘democratization of history’: the political contestation, class rhetoric and societal tensions that are tangled up in historical debates.

This article examines the divide between national and local collective memory in Poland and investigates the role of “memory activists” in mediating and exploiting this divide. It narrows its focus to the ethnic cleansing of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) from 1943 to 1944 and the forced relocation of Ukrainians in Poland, Operation Vistula, in 1947. It surveys local and national newspapers to understand competing interpretations and analyzes what incidents (e.g. protests, disputes, commemorations, reenactments, etc.) related to these events take place in local communities. It highlights the many actors, “memory activists,” and associations involved in pushing specific, often ahistorical, interpretations of these events – motivated by political gain, careerism, or personal conviction. It uses the theoretical works of Maurice Halbwachs and Karl Mannheim to effectively distinguish between local and national phenomenon and to elucidate the various nuances of collective memory.

Unionist politicians have argued that republican political violence on the Irish border, during both the partition of Ireland and more recent Northern Ireland conflict, constituted ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Protestant/unionist community in those areas. These views have been bolstered by an increasingly ambivalent scholarly literature that has failed to adequately question the accuracy of these claims. This article interrogates the ethnic cleansing/genocide narrative by analysing republican violence during the 1920s and the 1970s. Drawing a wide-range of theoretical literature and archival sources, it demonstrates that republican violence fell far short of either ethnic cleansing or genocide, (in part) as a result of the perpetrators’ self-imposed ideological constraints. It also defines a new interpretive concept for the study of violence: functional sectarianism. This concept is designed to move scholarly discussion of political and sectarian violence beyond the highly politicised and moral cul-de-sacs that have heretofore characterised the debate, and has implications for our understanding of political violence beyond Ireland.

The notion of ‘races’ divided by such fundamental and immutable differences that they cannot live together has long been rejected as unscientific and ideological. The notions of ‘nationalities’ and ‘ethnic groups’ at first seem more acceptable, yet they too are increasingly being used to refer to supposedly monolithic entities that are permanently divided from each other. When used by those who are trying to establish the supremacy of their own nationality or ethnic group in a given territory, they can be a pretext for persecution of minorities and ethnic cleansing, but all too often, the very same notions are used by those who see themselves as fighting against such policies. Sri Lanka offers a striking illustration of the impossibility of resolving the problem of persecution of minorities while using the same racist ideological framework that was used to create it in the first place. A completely different framework, acknowledging multilayered, multifaceted identities and multiple belongings, in combination with the politics of solidarity rather than segregation, has proved to be far more promising.

Muhammad Rashid Rida, the editor of al-Manar and one of the preeminent Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century, published between 1898 and 1935 dozens of reports, analyses, and Quran exegesis on Jews, Zionism, and the Palestine question. His scholarship greatly influenced the Muslim Brothers and still reverberates in the Arab political discourse today. Based on the first systematic reading and contextualization of al-Manar's pertinent texts, this article examines and explains the radical shifts in Rida's views: from describing Zionism as a humanitarian enterprise of a virtuous nation to depicting it as a plan for ethnic cleansing; from expressing doubts about the ability of the Arabs to prevail against the Jews to proclaiming certainty that they would; and from condemning French anti-Semitism to embracing hateful theories about Jewish conspiracies and vices.

In 1946, in the Southern Urals, construction of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics first plutonium plant fell to the GULAG-Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD). The chief officers in charge of the program – Lavrentii Beria, Sergei Kruglov, and Ivan Tkachenko – had been pivotal figures in the deportation and political and ethnic cleansing of territories retaken from Axis forces during WWII. These men were charged with building a nuclear weapons complex to defend the Soviet Union from the American nuclear monopoly. In part thanks to the criminalization and deportation of ethnic minorities, Gulag territories grew crowded with foreign nationals and ethnic minorities in the postwar years. The NKVD generals were appalled to find that masses of forced laborers employed at the plutonium construction site were members of enemy nations. Beria issued orders to cleanse the ranks of foreign enemies, but construction managers could not spare a single healthy body as they raced to complete their deadlines. To solve this problem, they created two zones: an interior, affluent zone for plutonium workers made up almost exclusively of Russians; and anterior zones of prisoners, soldiers, ex-cons, and local farmers, many of whom were non-Russian. The selective quality of Soviet “nuclearity” meant that many people who were exposed to the plant's secret plutonium disasters were ethnic minorities, people whose exposures went unrecorded or under-recorded because of their invisibility and low social value.