Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Coercive Use of Population Displacement in Civil Conflict

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project examines how, when, and why armed groups intentionally displace civilians during civil wars. While forced displacement has become an increasingly massive feature of modern conflicts, there have been few attempts to systematically analyze its use as a weapon of war. This is of urgent concern given that the number of people displaced by violence and persecution worldwide recently surged to levels not seen since World War II. This project uses new quantitative and qualitative data collected from human rights records and reports on displacement in civil wars from 1945-2004, in addition to archival and interview data gathered through field research in Africa, to investigate different types of displacement orchestrated by combatants, the distinct motivations underlying these strategies, and the conditions under which they are likely to be employed. Identifying the factors that drive armed groups to uproot civilians will offer crucial insights for practitioners hoping to anticipate and manage displacement, and to prevent, mitigate, and resolve armed conflicts more broadly. In light of the widespread and well-documented security and humanitarian consequences of forced migration, this project has implications for the national security of the United States. As the first study to systematically examine population displacement strategies in wartime, there are several potentially transformative aspects of this research. It will broaden and deepen the literatures on forced migration, civil war, and political violence by (a) unpacking the black box of conflict induced displacement and showing that it can take different forms and serve different strategic and tactical functions, and (b) collecting, analyzing, and disseminating original data on coercive displacement in civil wars, including a first-ever cross-national data set. In addition, this study will speak to enduring questions in the conflict literature by highlighting unexplored ways in which armed actors overcome limited information about civilians' loyalties and affiliations, and by offering a plausible mechanism for explaining the indiscriminate use of violence against noncombatants. Finally, this research will contribute to theorizing non-lethal violence, which conflict scholars have tended to neglect even though it affects far more people than homicides. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.