Introduction

Abstract

Since the creation of independent nation-states in Southeast Europe, several programs of mass population displacement and politics of dislocation have been implemented. Th e 1923 compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey, which fixed the destiny and the legal status of two million people, was considered at the time as a successful solution to interstate crisis regarding minorities. Th e geographical and political separation of Greek and Turkish Cypriots in 1976 and, more recently, the partitioning of Bosnia, define different ways of treating the same “problem.” What is interesting, however, is that different political regimes—royal (in the case of Greece), postcolonial “democratic” (in the case of Cyprus), postsocialist “democratic” (in the case of Bosnia)— resorted to similar “solutions.”