Geography of Violence: understanding 'territorial cleansing'. The cases of Bosnia Herzegovina and Colombia
Abstract
This cross-regional comparative analysis explores the links between extreme but far from isolated massacres perpetrated during the Bosnian War (1992-1995) and a selected interval in the Colombian internal conflict (1997-2003) with their motives and outcomes applying the 'territorial cleansing' framework. Indeed, the territories enduring massacres experienced a reconfiguration in the demographics compared to prior assaults, which included mass killings, 10 forced disappearances, evictions, and displacement.
Today, despite condemning these acts of political violence in ad hoc international courts and national tribunals, the question of the returnees remains unsolved or at least showing slow progress. Firstly, through the Inter-entity boundary line (IEBL) separating the Republika Srpska from the Bosnia-Herzegovina Federation, and secondly, with the land accumulation enterprise led by the paramilitaries in Colombia.
This 15 article aims to apply the framework proposed by Egbert et al. (2016) in search of conceptual gaps within the practices and strategies undertaken in the selected cases and contribute to the scholarly work bridging a geopolitical perspective within episodes of extreme or mass political violence.