Insurgent Demographic Engineering: A New Perspective on Civilian Displacement

• In Event: Rebel Governance, Legitimacy, and Civilian Behavior

Abstract

Why do so many civilians stay put in civil wars, or move in seemingly counterintuitive ways? The state-of-the-art literature focuses on conflict displacement in coercive settings, missing out on how armed groups influence civilian movement in contexts of established control that are not linked to full-fledged warfare but to governance. Rebels strategically provoke or limit the movement of civilians so as to make their territory a social greenhouse for their cause and to facilitate the annexation of bordering areas. I build a theory on ‘insurgent demographic engineering’ by means of a systematic in-depth case study on the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009). I find that apart from expelling disliked populations ('cleansing'), rebels induce their constituents to move into their territory ('recruitment'), resettle them to bordering areas ('dispatch'), or prevent them from moving at all ('confinement'). I use original qualitative and quantitative data from my own fieldwork in a comparative process-tracing approach to identify the causal mechanisms behind each displacement type, exploiting the substantial sub-national variation in warfare, territorial control and demographics between the North and the East of the country.

Author

• Theresa Leimpek, ETH ZURICH