Population resettlement in contested ethnoterritories is an old practice that states have pursued for centuries. There is a nascent theory of demographic engineering to explain the phenomenon, although a robust theory on the issue is yet to be built. Theorists generally agree that states transfer and resettle populations to gain territorial control over contested ethnoterritories. But what is not clear in the current scholarship is how states accomplish this or what techniques they deploy to gain territorial control. To address this theoretical lacuna, it is asserted that states seek to gain territorial control in two ways: ‘right-peopling’ (settlement of ‘preferred people’ to alter the demographic balance of the contested area) and ‘unpeopling’ (the extermination of the existing inhabitants). In this article these pathways to gain territorial control are explained by exploring the case of demographic engineering in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.
