Beyond genocide and ethnic cleansing: demographic surgery as a new way to understand mass violence

This article argues that while ethnic cleansing and genocide are generally recognized as major features of modern history, pitfalls inherent in both concepts make them seriously deficient for purposes of historical understanding, especially because of the legal nature (and relevance) of the term genocide. Both terms carry the risk of accounting only for a part (albeit a major one) of a larger history of mass violence and, by over-emphasizing this part, of contributing to the phenomenon of a posteriori ‘ethnization of history’. The article thus proposes the recourse to the new concept of ‘demographic surgery’—one that is able to account for many different, and yet fundamentally similar, instances of category-based persecution of particular groups of people resulting in their massive displacement and/or killing. Episodes of category-based mass killing and displacements have happened along a number of different lines. In addition to ethnic or racial markers, religious, social and ideological ones—isolated or in combination—have all been politicized and used to identify categories of populations targeted by perpetrators of demographic surgery. Even if it is unlikely that terms like genocide or ethnic cleansing will be jettisoned by future writers on issues of mass violence, the concept of demographic surgery will be useful to scholars who need to group together similar events in order to better understand them.