Professor David Carter has published a new article in International Organization, the leading international relations journal in political science. The article, titled, "Population Displacement and State Building: The Legacies of Pashtun Resettlement in Afghanistan," analyzes the long-term consequences of state-led population displacements, focusing on Afghanistan. State-led population displacement is common globally and is used as a strategy to try to consolidate state control over territory. The article shows that "under conditions that are common, the long-term consequences of forced displacement can cut against the central state's objective of firming up loyalty and control in regions far from the capital."
The article was co-written with former WashU Political Science PhD student Luwei Ying (now assistant professor at UCLA) and Austin Wright (University of Chicago). You can read the abstract below and the full article on the International Organization website.
Abstract:
Population displacement is a prominent state-building strategy. Using either force or positive inducements, states sponsor the resettlement of racial, ethnic, or linguistic groups to consolidate territorial control. We evaluate the long-run consequences of large-scale displacement by analyzing a historical episode in Afghanistan: the relocation of Pashtun communities during the rule of Emir Abd al-Rahman. Using historical records, we reconstruct the map of relocated tribes to identify contemporary settlements that are connected to the original displaced settlements. We analyze novel, microlevel survey data on more than 80,000 subjects to study how contemporary attitudes about the central government and the Taliban as well as individuals’ identity salience differ across coethnic communities separated by the emir’s state-building effort. We argue that under conditions common to many historical cases, settlers develop regional political identities that are neither ethnocentric, nor pro-central-state, nor focused on national identity. We show that the long-term consequences of the state-led resettlement of Pashtuns to northern Afghanistan are stronger attachments to regional government and local institutions, along with greater hostility to the central government and the Taliban relative to Pashtuns in the south and east.
