In the course of the Syrian Civil War, prominent former Syrian Regime politicians, human rights observers, and foreign observers have accused the Syrian Regime of committing genocide against the country's Sunni majority. This article views these accusations as part of a wider politicization of genocide, and instead progresses beyond them to outline the case for an alternative “framing” of large-scale atrocities committed against civilians. It accordingly proposes strategic displacement, or the deliberate large-scale uprooting and dispersal of established communities for tactical and strategic purposes, as a preferable and more sustainable framework of engagement and analysis, and seeks to more clearly distinguish it from “ethnic cleansing” with the aim of demonstrating and underlining its unique contribution to the analysis and understanding of violent conflict. This has two benefits—first, it provides a different basis for conceptual and theoretical engagement that makes it possible to view mass atrocity as a tactical innovation in response to conflict exigencies; and second, it draws attention to internal displacement, an aspect of the conflict that has been repeatedly overlooked by international observers.

中文翻译：

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超越种族灭绝：更好地分析和理解叙利亚政权在叙利亚内战中犯下的大规模暴行

在叙利亚内战期间，叙利亚前政权著名政客、人权观察员和外国观察员指责叙利亚政权对该国占多数的逊尼派实施种族灭绝。本文将这些指控视为更广泛的种族灭绝政治化的一部分，并超越这些指控，概述了针对平民实施的大规模暴行的另一种“框架”。因此，它提出战略性迁移，或出于战术和战略目的而故意大规模连根拔起和驱散已建立的社区，作为一种更可取且更可持续的参与和分析框架，并力求将其与“种族清洗”更明确地区别开来。目的是展示和强调其对分析和理解暴力冲突的独特贡献。这样做有两个好处：首先，它为概念和理论参与提供了不同的基础，使人们有可能将大规模暴行视为应对冲突紧急情况的战术创新；其次，它提请人们注意国内流离失所问题，这是冲突中一再被国际观察员忽视的一个方面。