Political cleansing of population
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Political cleansing of a population is the elimination of categories of people in specific areas for political reasons. The means may vary and include forced migration, ethnic cleansing and population transfers. Political cleansing has been used in many dictatorships.
Genocide Convention
Under the Genocide Convention, political groups are not a protected group if they are targeted with an intent to destroy the political group even if they share an ethnic, national or religious identity.[1][2][3]
Raphael Lemkin personally insisted against the inclusion of political groups in the Convention.[4] Lemkin wrote in his autobiography: "We in Latin America make revolutions from time to time, which involves the destruction of political opponents. Then we reconcile and live in peace. Later the group in power is thrown out in another revolution. Why should this be classified as the crime of genocide?"[3]
Protection of political groups was eliminated from the United Nations resolution after a second vote because many states, including Stalin's Soviet Union,[5] anticipated that clause to apply unneeded limitations to their right to suppress internal disturbances.[6][7] The reason given was that the protected groups were immutable, which scholars point out is unlikely, since religious and national affiliation are not immutable.[4]
Efforts to have political groups added to the Convention have been unsuccessful.[8]
Scholarly study of genocide usually acknowledges the United Nations omission of economic and political groups, and uses mass political killing datasets of democide, and genocide and politicide, or geno-politicide.[9] Killings by the Khmer Rouge in Democratic Kampuchea have been labeled genocide or autogenocide, and the deaths under Leninism and Stalinism in the Soviet Union, and Maoism in Communist China have been controversially investigated as possible cases; the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and the Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward have been controversially "depicted as instances of mass killing underpinned by genocidal intent."[10]
Politicide
Script error: No such module "For". Politicide is the deliberate physical destruction or elimination of a group whose members oppose a regime or share the main characteristic of belonging to a political movement. It is a type of political repression and one of the means used to politically cleanse populations, another being forced migration. It may be compared to genocide or ethnic cleansing, both of which involve the killing of people based on their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group rather than their adherence to a particular ideology.Script error: No such module "Unsubst".
Politicide is used to describe the killing of groups that are not covered by the Genocide Convention.[11] Social scientists Ted Robert Gurr and Barbara Harff use politicide to describe the killing of groups of people who are targeted not because of their shared ethnic or communal traits, but because of "their hierarchical position or political opposition to the regime and dominant groups."[12] Harff studies genocide and politicide, sometimes shortened as geno-politicide, in order to include the killing of political, economic, ethnic and cultural groups.[13] Manus Midlarsky uses politicide to describe an arc of large-scale killing from the western parts of the Soviet Union to China and Cambodia.[14] In his book The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Midlarsky raises similarities between the killings perpetrated by Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.[15]
Motives
Some groups attempt to eliminate the base of support for political opponents such as insurgents. This happens in many countries with high levels of insurgency such as Colombia.[16] It may be a means for and referred to as pacification.[17]
See also
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- Anti-communist mass killings
- Classicide
- Dahiya doctrine
- Domicide
- Reign of Terror
- Cuban exiles
- Death squads
- Desaparecidos
- Extrajudicial killing
- Forced settlements in the Soviet Union
- Human rights violations in Pinochet's Chile
- Hundred Flowers Campaign
- Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip
- Mass killings under communist regimes
- Population transfer in the Soviet Union
- Replacement migration
- Settler colonialism
- White Terror (disambiguation)
- Red Terror (disambiguation)
- Desaparecidos
- Genocide studies
- Ethnic cleansing
- Rwandan Genocide
- Gaza Genocide
References
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- ↑ Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".
- ↑ a b Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ a b Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Jones, Adam (2010). Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. p. 137. Template:ISBN. According to Jones: "Also unsurprisingly, it was the settler-colonial regimes who were most anxious to exclude cultural genocide from the Genocide Convention, as Raphael Lemkin’s biographer John Cooper points out." pp. 102.
- ↑ Schaack, Beth (1997). "The Crime of Political Genocide: Repairing the Genocide Convention's Blind Spot". The Yale Law Journal. 106 (7): 2259–2291. Script error: No such module "CS1 identifiers".. JSTOR 797169.Template:Catalog lookup linkScript error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".
- ↑ Staub, Ervin (June 2000). "Genocide and Mass Killing: Origins, Prevention, Healing and Reconciliation". Political Psychology. 21 (2): 367–382. Script error: No such module "CS1 identifiers".. JSTOR 3791796.Template:Catalog lookup linkScript error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Atsushi, Tago; Wayman, Frank W. (January 2010). "Explaining the Onset of Mass Killing, 1949–87". Journal of Peace Research Online. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications. 47 (1): 3–13. Script error: No such module "CS1 identifiers".. JSTOR 25654524. Template:S2CID.
- ↑ Williams, Paul (2008). Security Studies: An Introduction Template:Webarchive. London: Taylor & Francis. p. 321. Template:Isbn.
- ↑ Harff, Barbara; Gurr, Ted Robert (September 1988). "Toward Empirical Theory of Genocides and Politicides: Identification and Measurement of Cases since 1945". International Studies Quarterly. Wiley on behalf of The International Studies Association. 32 (3): 359–371. Script error: No such module "CS1 identifiers".. JSTOR 2600447. Template:Catalog lookup linkScript error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn"..
- ↑ Harff, Barbara, and Ted Robert Gurr. “Toward Empirical Theory of Genocides and Politicides: Identification and Measurement of Cases Since 1945.” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 3, 1988, pp. 359–71. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2600447. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
- ↑ Wayman, Frank W.; Tago, Atsushi (January 2010). "Explaining the Onset of Mass killing, 1949–87". Journal of Peace Research Online. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications. 47 (1): 3–13. Script error: No such module "CS1 identifiers".. JSTOR 25654524. Template:S2CID. Template:Catalog lookup linkScript error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".Script error: No such module "check isxn".. "The two important scholars who have created datasets related to this are Rummel (1995) and Harff (2003). Harff (sometimes with Gurr) has studied what she terms 'genocide and politicide', defined to be genocide by killing as understood by the Genocide Convention plus the killing of a political or economic group (Harff & Gurr, 1988); the combined list of genocides is sometimes labeled 'geno-politicide' for short. Rummel (1994, 1995) has a very similar concept, 'democide', which includes such genocide and geno-politicide done by the government forces, plus other killing by government forces, such as random killing not targeted at a particular group. As Rummel (1995: 3-4) says, 'Cold-blooded government killing ... extends beyond genocide'; For example, 'shooting political opponents; or murdering by quota'. Hence, 'to cover all such murder as well as genocide and politicide, I use the concept democide. This is the intentional killing of people by government' (Rummel, 1995: 4). So Rummel has a broader concept than geno-politicide, but one that seems to include geno-politicide as a proper subset." Quote at p. 4.
- ↑ Midlarsky, Manus (2005). The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century Template:Webarchive. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 22, 309–310. Template:Isbn.
- ↑ Midlarsky, Manus (2005). The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century Template:Webarchive. New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 321. Template:Isbn.
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
Further reading
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- Harff, Barbara (2004). "Genocide Politicide". Integrated Network for Societal Conflict Research. University of Maryland, College Park.
- Mesko, Zoltan G. (2003). The Silent Conspiracy: A Communist Model of Political Cleansing at the Slovak University in Bratislava after the Second World War. Template:ISBN.
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