The forced removal, displacement, or killing of an ethnic group from a territory to achieve demographic homogeneity. The term entered widespread international use during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, though the practice is ancient.
The phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ — a translation of the Serbo-Croatian ‘etničko čišćenje’ — came into international circulation during the Bosnian War of 1992–95, when Serbian forces expelled and killed Bosniak Muslims from territories they sought to control. As a descriptor it was both clinical and euphemistic: ‘cleansing’ implied the removal of something dirty, naturalising the violence by borrowing the language of hygiene, while ‘ethnic’ correctly identified that the violence was organised around communal identity rather than individual conduct. The International Court of Justice and international tribunals have wrestled with the relationship between ethnic cleansing and genocide: ethnic cleansing does not necessarily involve killing (forced deportation alone can achieve it), but it frequently does, and the line between mass expulsion and extermination is not always clear in practice. Cases in the twentieth century where ethnic cleansing was conducted include the Armenian Genocide (1915–23), the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after 1945, the partition of India (1947), the Palestinian Nakba (1948), the violence in former Yugoslavia (1991–99), Rwanda (1994), and the Yazidi genocide in Iraq and Syria (2014).
The concept of ethnic cleansing forces an uncomfortable confrontation with the relationship between demographic engineering and modern statehood. Many of the states we consider stable and legitimate today were built, at some point in their history, through processes of forced population transfer, ethnic massacre, or expulsion that we would now classify as ethnic cleansing. Post-war Poland, Greece and Turkey after 1923, Israel after 1948: in each case, the creation of an ethnically more homogeneous state required the violent displacement of populations that had lived there for generations. The international community’s response to ethnic cleansing in the 1990s — late, inadequate, and inconsistent — demonstrated both that there was a genuine normative consensus against it and that this consensus was insufficient to prevent it when committed by parties with great power protection or in conflicts without obvious strategic interest for the major powers.
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