Book Talk | Guilt by Location: Forced Displacement and Population Sorting in Civil Wars by Adam Lichtenheld

Key Themes  

Sorting Theory of Displacement 

In this book, Lichtenheld argues that displacement is not just a strategy to expel a target population, but also to sort them. Analyzing displacement as a military tactic is an important component to further understanding why people flee and why wartime actors want them to flee. In Guilt by Location, Lichtenheld establishes a typology for displacement in wartime:  

• Collateral displacement, which is an unintended byproduct of war where civilians choose to flee given the conditions. 
• Opportunistic displacement is driven by private motivations of wartime actors, such as looting and land grabbing. 
• Strategic displacement refers to “the deliberate, systematic, and coercive movement of civilians in wartime” as a concerted organizational strategy. 

Under strategic displacement, Lichtenheld identifies two primary approaches. The first is cleansing: a push-oriented strategy to collectively target members of a defined group (e.g., ethnic, religious) and expel individuals from an area. The second approach is forced relocation: a pull-oriented strategy to indiscriminately target all persons in a geographical area, regardless of their affiliations, and bring those individuals into a new domain. 

The book reveals that armed groups used strategic displacement in 65% of civil wars between 1945 and 2017. In those cases, states are by far the primary perpetrators of strategic displacement and forced relocation is more common than cleansing as a strategy. This highlights the value in understanding the forced relocation lens of state-perpetrated displacement. 

In war, combatants rely on information about the identities and affiliations of populations as a key resource. When they do not have this information, they will use heuristics, or information shortcuts, to infer characteristics of populations. The selection of social identity as a heuristic leads to cleansing of a particular group of persons.  

However, combatants may also select human mobility as a heuristic, whereas the geographic location and movement of a population indicates an affinity with a certain warring group. Although human mobility does not inherently reflect political or other loyalties, armed groups may perceive it to do so. In this way, populations become “guilty by location,” hence, the book title. Lichtenheld summarizes that “while cleansing aims to expel undesirable or disloyal populations, forced relocation seeks to identify them.” 

Case Studies: Forced Relocation in Uganda and Social Cohesion in Iraq 

The Ugandan government fought the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in a destructive civil war from the 1990s to 2000s. LRA and ADF fighters and supporters were often interspersed in villages and communities, leaving them difficult to identify, and the Ugandan government grappled with how to delineate insurgents from civilians. In response, the Ugandan government directed people to leave villages and resettle in IDP camps. Lichtenheld analyzed how the Ugandan government determined citizens’ loyalties by employing this forced relocation approach. He reviewed military and government documents and conducted over 200 interviews. The research revealed a common pattern for military operations during this time: the government would order villagers to leave their homes, cross an arbitrary demarcation line, and move to an IDP camp. The Ugandan military then treated persons who did not move to the camps as insurgents and targeted them with violence. In this way, the distinction between a rebel (or rebel sympathizer) and government supporter relied on geographical location, not active violence or provision of support to the LRA or ADP. 

Lichtenheld also conducted field research looking at social cohesion and returnees in  Iraq, aiming to understand the factors influencing the acceptance or rejection of returnees. Different communities resist the return of certain groups that they associate as complicit in the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) atrocities. In interviews with 500 Yazidi households, the researchers asked interviewees about a hypothetical returnee to Sinjar District. The demographic of this prospective returnee was manipulated through their ethnoreligious identity and their movement during the war. 

Yazidis were two times as likely to accept “leavers” than “stayers,” regardless of their ethnoreligious identity. And while they were generally more likely to accept Kurds than Arabs, it was not nearly as significant as the researchers expected. In fact, the Yazidis were willing to accept Arab “stayers” and Arab “collaborators” at almost the same rate. In this way, the Yazidi citizens use geographical location as a heuristic for ISIS loyalty or lack thereof, much like the Ugandan government did when aiming to identify LRA or ADP insurgents. As one interviewee reflected, “I trust him because he did not stay in Sinjar.” This research demonstrates that civilians, not just combatants, make assumptions about guilt by location. And these movement patterns influence whether or not people are willing to accept and live alongside others after war. 

Image Credit

Shutterstock | Tomas Davidov

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/sinjar-ninawairaq-december-2017-old-house-1700747236

Cross-National Analysis: Strategic Displacement 

Lichtenheld identified the nature of strategic displacement in 166 civil wars by reviewing conflict histories, case studies, and human rights reports from Human Rights Watch and others. He analyzed the types of strategic displacement and perpetrator against multiple variables, including war type (e.g., irregular war, symmetric war), rural peripheral insurgency (e.g., distance from capital, distance from conflict zone), and group level heuristics (i.e., if rebels claimed to represent a certain group). The core findings from these regressions, aligned with three key hypotheses, include the following: 

• Cleansing strategies are more likely to occur in symmetric wars than irregular wars, whereas forced relocation is more likely to occur in irregular wars. In symmetric wars, where states and rebels have similar capabilities, both groups aim to overtake territory, and cleansing allows them to do so by evicting the population. In irregular wars, where rebels are weaker than the state and try to blend in with the population, forced relocation allows state actors to identify the rebels. 
• Displacement where conflict occurs closer to the capital city is more likely to be cleansing and displacement further from the capital city is more likely to be forced relocation. States are less likely to have reliable information on populations as their rurality increases. Concentrating populations through forced relocation enables the state actors to better understand and evaluate the communities and their associations. 
• Cleansing is more likely when rebels claim to represent a specific demographic group, whereas forced relocation is more likely when rebels do not make such a claim. In the absence of group-level heuristics, governments use geographic location as a proxy for affiliation with a particular warring side. 

Insights from Participant Discussion  

Attendees at the book discussion, including academics, policy experts, and practitioners with expertise in migration patterns and displacement, discussed the research and findings presented in Guilt by Location. The conversation offered the following valuable insights: 

• The act of movement signals aspects of a fleer’s identity and loyalty to community members who stayed behind. How host communities perceive the choices and nuances surrounding someone’s displacement and their eventual return is a vital consideration for reintegration efforts. This context may be particularly relevant as we anticipate the large number of potential returnees to Latin America from the United States in 2025. 
• The heuristics impacting forced displacement are context-specific. Gender and age may have some diminishing effect on the use of forced relocation, as they may not be seen as the primary combatant. But the profile of a “model insurgent” varies, and so being a woman or child does not automatically absolve someone of being a collaborator. The specific heuristics that are correlated with forced relocation strategies do not reflect a consistent pattern conflict-to-conflict, or even within a single conflict. 
• State military capacity affects the ability to implement forced relocation. While weak states do not have the capacity to order any type of displacement, strong states are able to completely occupy rebel areas and do not need displacement strategies. Forced relocation offers a cheaper alternative for “medium capacity” states, considering proxies for capacity like gross domestic product, that have enough strength to order some level of population movement. 
• Despite the insecurity of IDP camps established during forced relocation, they still allow state actors to identify combatant loyalties. In practice, rebel groups may try to infiltrate IDP camps to further blur the lines between insurgents and civilians, as transpired in refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of the Congo following the Rwandan Genocide. Despite the issues it presents, even rebel infiltration supports the government’s goals to identify allegiances of those attacking the camps versus those being attacked. 
• Humanitarian actors should be wary of how their assistance may perpetuate a state’s political or military aims. State-sanctioned IDP camps rely on humanitarian assistance to function, and thus this aid may be furthering state strategies to sort and displace certain populations. Nongovernmental and government actors must balance both the humanitarian imperative and potential political ramifications. “Just because someone was forced to flee by a state versus they decided to flee doesn’t make them any less deserving of humanitarian assistance,” noted Lichtenheld. “But you have to take into account some of the political consequences of enabling armed actors” to displace people.  
• The findings of this book provide the structure for policymakers and analysts to reframe how they view forced displacement as a tool of war. The book does not necessarily offer direct recommendations for decision-making bodies or implementers, nor does it define if a state is exploiting humanitarian assistance for displacement. It does offer an analytical framework for conceptualizing displacement and how it is deliberately induced, which can serve as the basis for key considerations for implementers and policymakers alike. 

Key Implications for Research, Programming, and Policy 

Displacement is a common strategy of civil war, but the types of displacement serve different functions and are used in different contexts. The following are the core implications for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in considering the nature of forced displacement: 

• Build knowledge of trends in displacement tactics into forecasting models. Lichtenheld’s research describes certain conditions under which particular types of displacement are more likely to occur. This knowledge may contribute to anticipatory systems to help indicate the scale, scope, and nature of displacement in a civil war. Additional research on the contextual factors that drive displacement can further refine such forecasting techniques. 
• Recognize displacement as a war tactic or crime beyond ethnic cleansing. Cleansing strategies aim to get rid of the disloyal populations, affirming existing research. Conversely, forced relocation strategies aim to identify and profile the disloyal populations. This challenges some core assumptions about displacement as solely an outcome-driven tactic. “We need to look at the different ways that displacement might be induced or manipulated by armed groups,” remarked Lichtenheld, “if we want to hold perpetrators accountable; if we want to prevent or deter the use of it in the future.” 
• Incorporate state and civilian perspectives on displacement into peacebuilding strategies. Displacement is seen as a political act by both warring actors and civilians; civilians, not just combatants, evaluate guilt by location. As such, the politics behind displacement should be accounted for in peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction practices, especially when considering durable solutions for displaced persons. Movement patterns may create social rifts between those that fled and those that stayed and return may not be the right solution.