The five pressures
Communities are rarely erased in one blow. More often, pressure arrives through five channels at once. Each has an answering strength: something a community can build before the pressure peaks.
Pushed out
People are moved, priced out or prevented from staying
Roots
ties to place, ownership, tenure
ToolkitWritten out
Language, history and culture are dropped, renamed or banned
Heritage
passing on language, memory and practice
ToolkitSqueezed out
Livelihoods, businesses and land are taken or starved
Livelihood
income and assets the community controls
ToolkitWorn down
Stigma, surveillance and fear wear people down
Voice
telling your own story, in your own media
ToolkitSilenced
Leaders are removed, co-opted or made unsafe
Backbone
leadership spread across many people
ToolkitWhen all five pressures are aimed at one group, by people with the power to apply them, the result has a name. In the book Unerasable , Kubair Shirazee calls it nationocide , drawing on Raphael Lemkin's original 1944 idea of genocide as the destruction of a group's foundations, not only its people. Most communities never face all five. Every community can build all five strengths.