Guilt by Location
Forced Displacement and Population Sorting in Civil Wars

Examines how, when, and why armed groups use population displacement as a weapon of civil war.

Adam Lichtenheld (Author)

9781009523424, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 December 2024

346 pages
23.1 x 15.3 x 1.9 cm, 0.502 kg

'Population displacement during conflict is increasingly well documented but remains poorly understood. No longer. Distinguishing between different types of displacement and focusing on the strategies of the state, Lichtenheld finds that the most prevalent type, forced relocation, serves a key political goal: to sort friends from foes. Combining analytical clarity with empathy and brimming with implications, Guilt by Location is essential reading for better understanding conflict.' Stathis N. Kalyvas, University of Oxford

Population displacement is a devastating feature of contemporary conflict with far-reaching political and humanitarian consequences. This book demonstrates the extent to which displacement is a deliberate strategy of war, not just a consequence of it. Moving beyond instances of ethnic cleansing, Adam Lichtenheld draws on field research in Uganda and Syria; case studies from Burundi, Indonesia, and Vietnam; and an original dataset of strategic displacement in 166 civil wars to show that armed groups often uproot civilians to sort the targeted population, not to get rid of it. When lacking information about opponents' identities and civilians' loyalties, combatants use human mobility to infer wartime affiliations through 'guilt by location'. Different displacement strategies occur in different types of civil wars, with some relying on spatial profiling, rather than ethnic profiling. As displacement reaches record highs, Lichtenheld's findings have important implications for the study of forced migration and policy responses to it.

1. Weaponizing displacement in civil wars
2. Conceptualizing and describing strategic displacement
3. A sorting theory of strategic displacement
4. Cross-national evidence (1945–2017)
5. Forced relocation in Uganda
6. Comparative evidence of the sorting logic: Burundi, Vietnam, and Indonesia
7. Depopulation in Syria
8. The politics of wartime displacement
Appendix A: SDCC dataset
A B: A multivariate analysis of strategic displacement.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB]