Irregular war, like war, remains an enduring feature of security studies both as they relate to internal state security and sovereignty as well as to international relations. Irregular war may not always appear to hold political purposes; many today seem driven by religious ideology, but the institution of theocratic governance has a politics of its own. Thus, like regular war, irregular war is subordinate to a political purpose. Whether they occur on the periphery of regular wars or perform roles to keep state competition from escalating into conflict, irregular wars are often intricately tied to their regular counterparts. While two broad theories of counterinsurgency both claim to have prescriptions for winning an irregular fight, one – the good governance approach – is plagued by problems of implementation at the governmental level, and the other – coercion – entails unreasonable brutality against both insurgent and population, often unbefitting a liberal counterinsurgent force.

This chapter uses the Strategic Displacement in Civil Conflict dataset to conduct a cross-national analysis of displacement by state actors, who it finds are the predominant perpetrators. The statistical tests provide an indirect test of the arguments by revealing where strategic displacement in general, and forced relocation in particular, tends to occur, and by identifying the factors associated with the use of these strategies across conflicts. It also evaluates the observable implications of several alternative explanations for state-induced displacement, including ethnic nationalism, rebel threat/desperation, and collective punishment. The results show that, consistent with the theory, different displacement strategies occur in different contexts and seem to follow different logics. Cleansing is more likely in conventional civil wars, where territorial conquest takes primacy, while forced relocation is more likely in irregular wars, where information and identification problems are most acute. The evidence indicates that cleansing follows a logic of punishment. The results for relocation, however, are consistent with the implications of the assortative theory: It is more likely to be employed by resource-constrained incumbents fighting insurgencies in “illegible” areas – rural, peripheral territories – and when incumbents lack group-level information about wartime loyalties.