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 tests the book’s arguments in a case study from Uganda. The Ugandan government faced a series of armed rebellions throughout the country from 1986 to 2006, and it forcibly relocated civilians while fighting some rebel groups but not others. This chapter draws on a wealth of information collected during six months of fieldwork in 2016 and 2017 on how, when, where, and why authorities employed displacement. By exploiting within-case variation in the location and timing of relocation by the same government, the chapter conducts a structured, controlled comparative analysis. Drawing on original data – including archival materials, subnational violence and displacement data, and hundreds of interviews and surveys with political officials, military officers, rank-and-file soldiers, civil society groups, journalists, community leaders, and civilians – it traces the decision by Ugandan counterinsurgents to employ forced relocation, examine the observable implications of the theory, and demonstrate the assortative logic of displacement. It also shows that alternative logics are insufficient to explain variation in this case.

This chapter develops the main argument of the book. It posits that some displacement strategies – namely, forced relocation – act as a mechanism for sorting the population in wartime. The argument focuses on how the territorialization of political identity in civil wars and the tendency for combatants to utilize informational shortcuts impels them to use relocation to identify opponents through “guilt by location.” It also shows that relocation can create “zones of appropriation” that facilitate the mobilization of the population into the war effort, without requiring combatants to invest in resource-intensive methods of territorial occupation. To demonstrate the logic and plausibility of each aspect of the "assortative" theory of displacement and illustrate its central causal claims, the chapter provides empirical examples from a wide range of civil wars, from the Revolt of the Camisards in eighteenth-century France, to colonial wars in British, French, Japanese, and Portuguese territories, to modern conflicts in Angola, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka. The chapter also discusses a set of hypotheses and observable implications of the theory.

Chapter 2 examines how the CCP recruited millions of workers to construct the Third Front. Party officials sought to socially engineer a labor force that embraced Maoist norms and disregarded difficulties that moving to remote inland areas brought to their family or their own person. In practice, people responded to recruitment in various ways. Some thought of expanding China’s industrial defenses as a way of manifesting their devotion to Chinese socialism. Many others were more concerned about the material benefits and burdens that Third Front participation would bring to their region, factory, family, or self. Shanghai leaders urged central planners not to neglect the coast, whereas administrators in inland provinces requested more skilled workers and equipment. Urban residents fretted over what housing, schooling, and cultural activities would be available in China’s impoverished hinterlands. Rural youth, on the other hand, were eager to earn higher wages. But many of their parents were worried about losing household labor and the possibility that their children might be accidentally injured or die. Overall, my research illustrates that the consequences of enlisting in the Third Front were not always clear and that the value of being involved varied according to one’s geographical, social, and economic position.