Description
What explains the global proliferation of ethnic cleansing from the eighteenth century onwards? Under what conditions are violent forced expulsions perceived as a viable strategy for actors? Scholars of ethnic cleansing have developed theories that examine how modernisation and nation-state development generates the ideological and political conditions for the othering of out-groups and homogenisation of the population. I argue that by situating modernity and the modern state within the historical development of capitalist social-property relations, we may better understand the structural and material conditions of modern ethnic cleansing. Modern ethnic cleansing, I argue, is the culmination of increased market integration, transformations in domestic economic and social relations generated by technological innovation and capital accumulation, and the resistance towards such changes by producers. Rather than being a product of modernity, ethnic cleansing is best understood as a modernising act, utilised by actors seeking to consolidate emerging social systems. I will be inductively probing the theory through three positive cases of modern ethnic cleansing which contain significant spatial, temporal, and historical variation: the Highland Clearances in Scotland (1750-1850), the expulsion of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia (1945-1950), and the expulsion of Rohingya from Myanmar (2017). This work contributes to the study of ethnic cleansing and organised political violence more broadly by developing a theoretical framework that centres the historical-material conditions of large-scale organised political violence.
