I was reading this thread in /r/badhistory, and people began discussing the difficulties of nation building. One commenter noted that genocide was very common during nation building, while others disagreed. Is there any way to shed light into the matter, or is the question to vague to answer?
Not an expert, but I have taken a course on the subject with Scott Straus, a leading researcher in the field. Unfortunately, the short answer is that we don't really know. Genocide studies is a very underdeveloped field outside of analysis on the Holocaust. Furthermore, there has been virtually no research into instances where the elements that have been shown to correlate to genocide yet no genocide actually takes place. Since we are not yet able to truly distinguish between events where genocide "should" take place but doesn't with those where it does, we know that there is not yet a comprehensive understanding of the elements that are involved with a genocide taking place. That being said, we can say with certainty that genocide is an extremely rare event, and as such is unlikely to be an "occurrence in the process of nation-building". Genocide is more likely in civil wars centered around ethnic or religious divide, especially if one group is trying to re-establish the government rather than secede, but we can only say it is more likely and certainly not that it is a definitive factor. Straus wrote an excellent synthesis of the current literature that can give a nice overview of the field and what we can say right now with the empirical evidence we do have: Retreating from the Brink: Theorizing Mass Violence and the Dynamics of Restraint
The problem with the term genocide is that it is a legal term that was drafted in 1948 after the holocaust. And as a legal term it has significant problems. The term is both excessively far reaching and yet doesn't go far enough in other areas. Genocide was defined at the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. It was defined as
the mental element, meaning the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such", and
the physical element which includes five acts described in sections a, b, c, d and e. A crime must include both elements to be called "genocide."
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The phrase "in whole, or in part" makes the definition far reaching. There is no numerical value for genocide, merely the intent and action of (partial) destruction of a people. This is probably where the other commentator was coming from. If warfare and conquest is a part of nation building then the ensuing destruction, in whole or part, is technically genocide, as the invading country did intend to destroy part of the people they were conquering. You may, however, note that political dissidents, people of different genders, or people of different social classes are not covered by genocide, only a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
Tldr- The legal definition of genocide has significant issues and if read in a broad manner, allows one to consider many aspects of warfare as genocide, and therefore conclude that nation building often includes genocide.