Department of Politics and International Relations
What Drives Ethnic Cleansing in Post-Colonial South Asia?
Posted on 16 January 2020
In her latest opinion piece with The Globe Post, “What Drives Ethnic Cleansing in Post-Colonial South Asia?" (link), Rudabeh Shahid, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Leverhulme funded “Rethinking Civil Society” project, argues that:
“When political analysts scrutinize cases of ethnic cleansing in post-colonial South Asia, they often determine the triggers to be political opportunism via communal vote bank politics, manipulation of institutions to discriminate minority groups, and the inevitability of the clash of contrasting cultures.
While all these reasons perhaps are triggers, one other major commonly understated factor is what can be termed “demographic jitter,” the alarm created among the majority population due to an alteration in demographic balance.”