About this episode

Dr. Meghan Garrity discusses her book on the politics and implications of mass expulsion throughout history.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, governments around the world have expelled, en masse, more than 30 million people. Yet despite its prevalence, mass expulsion remains an understudied phenomenon as scholarly attention has been directed toward the gravest atrocities—genocide and mass killing—or toward forced migration more broadly. Mass Expulsion: The Politics of Forced Population Removal (Oxford UP, 2026) by Dr. Meghan Garrity examines why and how governments expel, providing a systematic, cross-regional account of mass expulsion over the longue durée. Using the original Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion (GSME) dataset, the book explains when and where expulsion occurs, who is targeted, and what regimes are most likely to expel. The book identifies two overarching categories of mass expulsion—security and economic—and develops a typology of four corresponding types: counter-irredentist, counter-subversive, reprisal, and nativist. It advances a theory of mass expulsion that traces the decision-making process, showing how key structural, proximate, precipitating, and intervening factors combine to shape the conditions under which governments expel or are…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Meghan Garrity

Topics covered

• mass expulsion
• forced population removal
• political violence
• international peace and security
• government policies

Keywords

• mass expulsion
• forced migration
• government policies
• political violence
• international relations

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Oxford UP, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, International Committee of the Red Cross, League of Nations

Places: Switzerland

More episodes of New Books in National Security

• Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell, "'PS: Burn after Reading': The Kellock-Taschereau Commission and Soviet Espionage" (U Toronto Press, 2026) · August 29, 2026 · 57 min
• Edward Goldring, "Purges: How Dictators Fight to Survive" (Cornell UP, 2026) · August 24, 2026 · 40 min
• Steve Feldstein, "Bytes and Bullets: Global Rivalries, Private Tech, and the New Shape of Modern Warfare" (St. Martin's Press, 2026) · August 23, 2026 · 45 min
• A. J. Murphy, "Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business" (Harvard UP, 2026) · August 21, 2026 · 38 min
• Jacob Hagstrom, "Asymmetric Warfare: Politics and Cultures of Violence in the Modern Era" (Cambridge UP, 2025) · August 18, 2026 · 24 min
• Hossam el-Hamalawy, "Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi's New Republic (Verso Books, 2026) · August 14, 2026 · 1h 37m

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the New Books in National Security podcast page.