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As a scholar studying the nexus of international peace and security, political violence, and forced migration, Schar School of Policy and Government assistant professor Meghan M. Garrity thinks a lot about ethnic cleansing.
And she thinks the term is the wrong one to describe the systematic and violent forced removal of an ethnic group from a given territory by a more powerful ethnic group.
“I recommend social scientists abandon the term because of five critical areas of conceptual confusion: discrepancies in the core meaning, practice versus policy, its lack of boundedness, universe of cases, and subtype classification criteria,” she writes in a new study, ‘Ethnic Cleansing’: An Analysis of Conceptual and Empirical Ambiguity, published this fall in Political Science Quarterly.
Garrity brings her scholarship to the Schar School’s new undergraduate major, International Security and Law, a one-of-a-kind degree program intended to prepare graduates to become leaders in the face of crisis. Ethnic cleansing certainly meets that criterion. Ethnic cleansing, along with other atrocities, including genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, are some of the most urgent crises—as demonstrated in Ukraine, Gaza, Myanmar, Yemen, and Sudan, just to name a few.
In the study of mass atrocities, words matter, and to Garrity, “ethnic cleansing” imprecisely defines the action.
Conceptual confusion around the term ethnic cleansing, she argues, “undermines effective comparative analysis and, in turn, our understanding of the causes of ethnic cleansing and associated policy recommendations.”
Garrity suggests the solution is to abandon the social science usage of the term ethnic cleansing in favor of alternative, more precisely descriptive concepts that convey the distinct intention of the perpetrators. She suggests four concepts be used instead of ethnic cleansing.
That grim vocabulary includes:
- Massacre (with the intent to annihilate)
- Mass expulsion (with the intent to remove)
- Coercive assimilation (with the intent to eliminate a unique cultural identity)
- Control (with the intent to subjugate)
These alternative terms “eliminate ambiguity, improve theoretical precision, and open a promising new research agenda,” she says.
Garrity’s reasoning is as precise as the language she recommends: “Each concept is group based; collectively targets specific populations; and is defined by the perpetrator’s aims, not its practices. These are not the only concepts related to policies of ethnic elimination or management but they are the four that I suggest best capture the disparate meanings of ethnic cleansing.”
The proposed alternative concepts are more definitionally precise and conceptually bounded than ethnic cleansing and, as such, allow for improved theoretical precision and understanding of the causes and consequences of these abhorrent phenomena.
Garrity deliberately excludes the word “genocide” in the conversation, a word that has legal obligations and mandatory responses from world leaders.
“Using ‘massacre’ instead of ‘genocide’ as an organizing concept [is meant to] indicate policies that intentionally annihilate or destroy groups [and] allows scholars to break free from legal entrapments,” she writes.
“For an event to be considered a massacre, not every person from a target group must be killed, but the actions of the perpetrator must aim to deny the continued existence of the identified group. Whether the group’s annihilation is total or partial is not germane to the categorization of events as a massacre,” she says.
In contrast, “mass expulsion” policies intend to remove the targeted group, not to annihilate them. A mass expulsion is defined as “a systematic government-sponsored policy to remove an ethnic, racial, religious or national group, as such, with no individual legal review and with no recognition of the right to return.” This definition excludes the removal of political groups, but the same concept could be used with different target groups identified.
“Although the acts or practices used in carrying out a mass expulsion may sometimes overlap with those used by perpetrators of massacres (i.e., mass killings), the intention is distinct,” Garrity says. “A mass expulsion aims to remove the group outside of a specified area, not to deny its continued existence.” Examples include Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia (1945–46), Palestinians from Israel (1947–49), and Haitians from the Dominican Republic (1990s).
The third alternative concept is coercive assimilation. “Here the intent is to eliminate a unique cultural identity by destroying specific characteristics of a group, to force the group members to become like the majority,” she writes. The concept of coercive assimilation outlined in her article encompasses the idea of “cultural genocide” that Raphael Lemkin advocated to be included as part of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
“Not all scholars conceptualize coercive assimilation as an eliminationist policy or as part of ethnic cleansing, but others do,” she writes. “Those who conceptualize coercive assimilation as an assimilationist policy rather than an eliminationist policy include coercive and noncoercive assimilationist methods together.”
Garrity argues “coercive actions such as banning languages, closing or prohibiting educational and cultural institutions, destroying religious sites, forced conversions, killing target-group elites, forced resettlement, or colonizing minority areas by infusing ethnically dominant settler groups should be analyzed separately from noncoercive assimilationist policies of national integration that encourage the adoption of the dominant groups’ culture.”
“This distinction centers on the intention of the perpetrator,” she writes. In the case coercive assimilation, the aim is to eliminate a unique cultural identity, whereas noncoercive assimilation aims to voluntarily allow for the melting pot of minority cultures into the dominant culture. Examples of coercive assimilation include the Kurds in Turkey (1923–34), Chakma in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh (1979–84), and the Uighurs in China (late 1950s).
The last alternative concept Garrity proposed to be used instead of ethnic cleansing is control, with the intent to subjugate a group. “This concept draws on [University of Pennsylvania political scientist Ian] Lustick, who defines a control approach as one ‘in which a superior power of one segment is mobilized to enforce stability by constraining the political actions and opportunities of another segment.’ There are different types and degrees of violence used to maintain a control system,” she says.
Garrity expects pushback from those who contend her alternative concepts go too far in disaggregating policies, while others may think there is a risk in focusing too intently on labels to the detriment of prevention or response efforts.
However, she contends that “this detailed conceptual work is an essential precursor to identifying the critical enabling and constraining factors that facilitate or deter these abhorrent policies,” she says. “We should not have to rely on ‘know it when you see it’ social science when it comes to mass atrocities.”