Ethnic Cleansing and the Politics of Restraint: Violence and Coexistence in the Lebanese Civil War

Abstract

What happens when an armed group has military incentives to engage in ethnic cleansing, but political incentives to abstain? I argue that militants can solve this dilemma by collecting intelligence that allows them to discriminate between neutral and militant non-coethnics and target only the latter. Armed groups are better able to do so in intermixed areas, where loyal coethnics provide intelligence, and thus more likely to perpetrate selective violence in such locations. Homogenous, non-coethnic enclaves are more susceptible to ethnic cleansing as armed groups often have little choice but to use ethnicity as proxy for political loyalties. I elaborate and test this argument using an original data set and extensive interviews on a critical case in the literature on ethnic cleansing: the Lebanese civil war of 1975 to 1990.