Organised forced migration and the external drivers of eliminationist politics

This article examines external drivers of eliminationist politics, by bringing in the geopolitical and foreign policy context as explanatory factors in cases of organised forced migration (OFM). Drawing on examples from an ongoing dataset-building project, we identify and explicate a number of direct and indirect externally-driven pathways to organised forced migration. First, powerful actors have historically used OFM to engage in eliminationist politics in external polities in the context of imperial rule and interventionism, by engineering the demographic profiles of societies to stabilise their own rule, reflect their geopolitical preferences or secure labour for other colonial projects. Second, powerful states have redrawn boundaries and negotiated war settlements that have shifted local dynamics in ways that involved OFM as methods of ordering and reordering territorial boundaries after the fighting stops. Finally, states have employed organised forced migration in pursuit of a wide array of foreign policy objectives. Our piece illustrates these dynamics by presenting illustrative examples and highlighting the value-added of incorporating international factors into our understanding of eliminationist politics.