Ethnic Cleansing

Ethnic cleansing refers to the systematic, forced removal of an ethnic or religious group from a given territory by a more powerful group, using intimidation, expulsion, violence, and sometimes killing, with the aim of creating an ethnically homogeneous area. The term entered wide use during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, though similar practices have occurred throughout history, as in the Armenian deportations and the partition of India. It is not a distinct crime in international law, but acts of ethnic cleansing may constitute crimes against humanity or genocide. Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide, and Zygmunt Bauman argued in Modernity and the Holocaust that bureaucratic rationality and social engineering made mass violence possible. Michael Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy linked ethnic cleansing to the ideal of rule by the people, as demos becomes identified with ethnos. Norman Naimark traced ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century Europe, and Benedict Anderson, Rogers Brubaker, and Andreas Wimmer analyzed nationalism and boundary making. Hannah Arendt’s work on statelessness shows the vulnerability of the expelled. Ethnic cleansing remains central to research on nationalism, genocide, conflict, human rights, and forced migration.