Eliminationist Politics

State and non-state actors recurrently aim to destroy, remove, or erase certain groups within their territories—with devastating human consequences. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, tens of millions of civilians have been killed in episodes of genocide and mass killing, and tens of millions more have been expelled from their homes.

In a new special issue that Meghan Garrity and I co-edited for the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, titled The Logics of Eliminationist Politics, we bring together scholars from across subfields to examine the causes, rhetoric, tactics, and consequences of eliminationist policies across diverse cases and contexts (see Table of Contents below) .

The issue opens with an introductory article I co-authored with Meghan, titled “Eliminationist Politics: An Analytical Framework”. In it, we take stock of how scholars across the social sciences conceptualize and operationalize eliminationist policies—defined as “deliberate actions by state or non-state actors aimed at destroying, removing, or erasing groups based on salient identity categories”.

While existing research has generated major theoretical insights, we argue that persistent variation in concepts and measures carries important implications for theory-building, empirical inference, and ultimately for understanding prevention. To illustrate what is at stake, we revisit a paradigmatic case—the 1923 Greco-Turkish compulsory population exchange—and show how different analytical choices produce distinct causal narratives and claims to generalizability.

Together, these articles highlight the value of cross-disciplinary dialogue and lay the groundwork for a more integrated analytical framework for studying eliminationist politics.

Table of Contents

Eliminationist politics: an analytical framework

by Meghan M. Garrity & Harris Mylonas

Ethnopopulism and genocidal eliminationism: A discourse analysis of hate speech in the 1994 Rwandan genocide

by Erin Jenne & Promise Frank Ejiofor

Organised forced migration and the external drivers of eliminationist politics

by Fiona B. Adamson & Kelly M. Greenhill

A special kind of hate? The rhetoric of genocide

by Svitlana Chernykh, Benjamin E. Goldsmith & Sascha Nanlohy

Don’t count me out: Erasure of ethnicity and ethnic groups from national censuses

by Avital Livny

Ambiguous elimination: Jordan’s denationalisation of West Bank Palestinians

by Lillian Frost