Return and reconciliation after ethnic cleansing

This planned project explores under which conditions relations between ethnic groups can be rebuilt after displaced communities return.

It focuses on how nationalist and transnational understandings of ethnicity shape the risk of renewed violence after return, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa.

To answer this question, I plan to leverage information on perpetrators’ justification for ethnic cleansing from the Geo-Located Ethnic Forced Displacement Dataset (GeoEFD), and comparative case analyses.

This project aims to contribute theoretically and empirically novel findings that inform researchers and policymakers how narratives of foreignness, territorial belonging, and transnational threat can lock in the divisions created by displacement, and how such narratives can be overcome to improve prospects for return, reconciliation, and durable peace.