The first part of this chapter distinguishes war-related displacement from other types of population movements, including displacement due to communal violence, state repression, development, and natural disasters. It then unpacks the “black box” of war-related displacement by distinguishing between “collateral” displacement, “opportunistic” displacement, and “strategic” displacement. It then disaggregates strategic displacement into three subtypes – cleansing, depopulation, and forced relocation – and shows that they vary in orientation, targeting, and intended duration. The second part of the chapter introduces a new dataset on population displacement strategies in 166 civil wars from 1945 to 2017. It describes the relative frequency of these strategies across conflicts and over time and how they vary by perpetrator and types of civil wars. The dataset serves both descriptive and explanatory purposes. It shows that strategic displacement has been much more common in civil wars than previously thought and reveals important patterns in how, where, and when these strategies have been employed, which can be leveraged to explain why they occur.

This chapter uses the Strategic Displacement in Civil Conflict dataset to conduct a cross-national analysis of displacement by state actors, who it finds are the predominant perpetrators. The statistical tests provide an indirect test of the arguments by revealing where strategic displacement in general, and forced relocation in particular, tends to occur, and by identifying the factors associated with the use of these strategies across conflicts. It also evaluates the observable implications of several alternative explanations for state-induced displacement, including ethnic nationalism, rebel threat/desperation, and collective punishment. The results show that, consistent with the theory, different displacement strategies occur in different contexts and seem to follow different logics. Cleansing is more likely in conventional civil wars, where territorial conquest takes primacy, while forced relocation is more likely in irregular wars, where information and identification problems are most acute. The evidence indicates that cleansing follows a logic of punishment. The results for relocation, however, are consistent with the implications of the assortative theory: It is more likely to be employed by resource-constrained incumbents fighting insurgencies in “illegible” areas – rural, peripheral territories – and when incumbents lack group-level information about wartime loyalties.