Post-Colonialism Compared: Potentials and Limitations in the Middle East and Central Asia
Author(s)
Kandiyoti, Deniz
Abstract
The emergence of the category of enemy nation and the practice of ethnic cleansing (that is, the forcible relocation of an ethnically defined population away from a given territory) was one of the most momentous developments in the Soviet nationalities policy of the mid-1930s. My account of the origins of Soviet ethnic cleansing will attempt to address this paradox by showing how the same principles that informed Soviet nation-building in the 1920s, under certain conditions, could and did lead to ethnic cleansing and ethnic terror against a limited set of stigmatized nationalities, while leaving nation-building policies in place for the majority of nonstigmatized nationalities.
