Ethnic Cleansing and the Formation of Settler Colonial Geographies

Gordon, Neve; Ram, Moriel

Abstract

Taking into account that ethnic cleansing not only undoes the legal and spatial formations within a given territory but also is a productive force aimed at securing and normalizing a new political order within a contested territory, we examine its impact on settler colonial geographies. We show that the relative completeness or incompleteness of ethnic cleansing helps shape the specific configuration of two intricately tied sites of social management – spatial reproduction and legal governance – within settler colonial regimes. We claim that complete ethnic cleansing produces a ‘refined’ form of settler colonialism resembling the colonial geographies of North America and Australia and is more readily normalized, while incomplete ethnic cleansing produces an ‘intermediate’ form of settler colonialism similar to the colonial regime in Rhodesia before the settlers lost power and is impossible to normalize due to a series of contradictions stemming from the presence of the ‘indigenous other’. To uncover this less acknowledged feature of ethnic cleansing we compare two territories that were colonized by Israel during the 1967 War: the Syrian Golan Heights and the Palestinian West Bank.

Citation

Gordon, N., & Ram, M. (2016). Ethnic Cleansing and the Formation of Settler Colonial Geographies. Political Geography, 53, 20-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.01.010

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 1, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Feb 15, 2016
• Publication Date: Jul 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: May 15, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: May 15, 2019
• Journal: Political Geography
• Print ISSN: 0962-6298
• Electronic ISSN: 1873-5096
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 53
• Pages: 20-29
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.01.010
• Keywords: Settler colonialism, Colonial geography, Ethnic cleansing, Israel/Palestine, The West Bank, The Golan Heights