| Abstract | Abstract Abstract:Following the 2005 murder of a Dominican woman near the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, Haitian communities were deported en masse and their homes violently ransacked by Dominican civilians seeking revenge. These violent expulsions were not only human-rights violations but part of a historic pattern of anti-Haitianism in the Dominican Republic that originated in the nineteenth century. This article calls attention to the possibility of genocidal violence in the Dominican Republic by examining the violent 2005 attacks on the Haitian community there. It suggests that an anti-Haitian legacy that includes the 1937 Haitian Massacre and the contemporary and systematic denial of Dominican citizenship to Dominicans of Haitian descent are important but understudied indicators that raise the potential for an escalation of mass violence against the largest ethnic and racial minority in the Dominican Republic.
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