Ethnic Cleansing, History of

Abstract

‘Ethnic cleansing’ is a term which came into common use in 1992 during the war in the former Yugoslavia. It was initially applied to describe Serbian attacks on Bosnian Muslims with the intention of driving the Muslims from territory claimed by the Bosnian Serbs. Some scholars criticized the term as a euphemism for genocide. But the distinction between genocide—the purposeful killing of part or all of a nation, religious, or ethnic group—and ethnic cleansing, whose goal is to drive a people from a designated territory, is useful for understanding the war in Yugoslavia, as well as similar cases throughout the twentieth century. Ethnic cleansing has genocidal aspects, as witnessed in Yugoslavia. In some cases, ethnic cleansing leads to or overlaps with genocide; the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust are cases in point. Ethnic cleansing is fundamentally a product of the modern (or modernizing) states that espouse the ideologies of integral nationalism. Political elites seek to attain and/or build political power by exploiting nationalism and its need to create the domestic ‘other’ in order to foster solidarity among the dominant nationality. Especially during war and the transition from war to peace, this process can lead to ethnic cleansing.