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.

• Provides a new conceptual and analytical framework to explain wartime displacement a substantially urgent issue in world affairs and the differentways it manifests in armed conflicts
• Introduces a new theory of displacement using an extensive set of empirical examples from a diverse array of civil wars,connecting different components of the theory to real-world events
• Presents new data, evidence, and testimonies on population displacement strategies, providing a novel,cross-national dataset that can be used in other researchand will help identify risk factors that can be incorporated into early warning and monitoring systems by policymakers, advocates, and humanitarian practitioners